Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (38 page)

Women must participate in all aspects of business activities. In other words, it is essential that women not only manage people and advance the careers of others but also that they must be prepared and determined to manage themselves individually, and they must have the desire to be involved and to participate in doing so.
It is all up to how motivated, committed, and determined you
[women]
are to accept responsibilities and take on challenging jobs
. [emphasis added]

Just as the WGW called on female workers to reflect critically on their readiness and willingness to take their jobs seriously and improve themselves through their work, the management also demanded that women prepare themselves to compete and accept the challenges in the new world of (ostensibly gender-blind) equal, merit-based opportunity. What unites capital and labor here is the figure of the neoliberal subject, an independent, self-determined and self-determining, responsible individual, whose conduct simulates the logic of the market. The article continues:

We at MJL are not simply considering equal opportunity but seriously thinking about the full involvement and participation of all female workers in all aspects of our business.
Now it is all up to whether or not you
[women]
take the initiative fully to contribute to the growth of MJL as well as to the benefit of the society
.
You
have roles to play. So don’t hesitate. In the next ten years, we want more of you to take positions with various responsibilities, and some of you even to take senior managerial positions. It is realizable, and our organization is already prepared for it.
So it now all depends on whether or not you accept challenging roles
. [emphasis added]

Both management and the WGW collapse the distinction between the social and the economic on the one hand and ethics and money on the other. Individual actors are to strategize on new terrain appearing with the neoliberal erosion of the social. But management and the WGE
invoked this framing for different reasons
. The WGW invested the neoliberal subject with the image of a professional woman—an economically independent and socially worthy individual, who knows what she wants and wants what she chooses, who optimizes her potential in the merit system, and who thus realizes her ideal self through work. On the other hand, as is seen in the preceding paragraphs, when the management endorses the idea of equal opportunity, saying that “our system is ready [read: nondiscriminatory], and it is all up to women,” it envisions a risk-taking, self-motivated, citizen-worker in the merit system who will, in the case of suboptimal performance or disruption on account of family obligations, be mercilessly cut off from any company safety net, traditionally understood (for men) to reside in the system of seniority and lifetime employment.

By “equal opportunity,” the management means “the full participation of all female workers in all business activities”—a remarkable displacement of the possibility of democratic inclusion into simply more of the same labor-control system, one historically designed for the male family-waged breadwinner-citizen-worker. Equal opportunity for women, if management could have its way, would not compromise the existing labor system’s rules and forms of gender-based exploitation and exclusion. The difference is that this new sexism seamlessly fits into the neoliberal total mobilization of the population into its own responsibilization and self-governing. Business is happy indeed to be truly gender blind, as long as what it needs from employees at the bottom line is not tinkered with.

This all recalls the discourse of neoliberal welfare reform in the United States. In U.S. welfare-to-work programs, in which welfare recipients—predominantly minority women with children—are required to get job training, and eventually, a job, in exchange for welfare benefits, women on welfare
are
presumed to be underresponsibilized as individuals. Being unemployed is considered to be an ethical and moral failure on the part of welfare recipients—as is clear in the prevailing welfare stereotypes of laziness, “welfare queens,” and intergenerational dependence. What gets elided, of course, is the inevitable existence of capitalism’s reserve army of labor, as well as other structural political-economic arrangements that guarantee the presence of the unemployed and the poor. The brilliance of neoliberal welfare reform discourse is to convert outwardly racist and sexist stereotypes—these have not disappeared but rather have become rearticulated into cases for practical self-improvement and individual empowerment. In the same manner, the MJL management repeats the point that it all depends on how women are (morally) self-prepared to accept challenging jobs; it is not a question of whether they deserve to receive equal treatment. In a statement that, with only minor alteration, could have been disseminated by anti–welfare-rights ideologues in the United States, the MJL management wrote:

The reason that we stress this point to such a great degree is that we have an impression that only a handful of women are prepared to accept challenging jobs, while others seem to welcome as an excuse the view that male employees and colleagues, and most of the male management, are opposed to equal opportunity. This is, of course, true with particular cases, but it is not our policy, and therefore, it can no longer be used as an excuse [for women not to accept challenging jobs].

Now that the company supports the idea of equal opportunity and invites women to the full range of company business activities, they no longer have any excuse not to respond to its “total mobilization”—through the magic of the universal, gender-blind, free market—to fully and responsibly engage in their work. It would only be because of women’s moral failure—by their being lazy and irresponsible, lacking in motivation and a sense of professionalism, escaping from freedom—that they might not get hired or promoted or be satisfied with their jobs. Don’t blame the company or your supervisor for being sexist. And if you quit, this is your completely free “choice.”

“POWER UP FOR WOMEN” WORKSHOPS

The workshop was another technology to produce the “truth” of female workers and their interests. While the survey assumed the rational subject
to be expressing her subjective view with regards to the questions, the workshop relies on the technology of confession and the confessing subject (Foucault 1978), one who is willing to speak her secret, authentic experience and feelings as a female worker at MJL. It was the WGW’s mission in these workshops to bring women’s private voice—repressed and ignored—into public expression and to have it be heard by management. It is important to recognize the extent to which the workshop is a medium of communication endemic to liberal democracy, both enabled and constrained by a specific political rationality. As Foucault (1978: 62) shows in his discussion of how the truth of sexuality is brought into being, confession is a ritual that “produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him [sic]; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.” The woman-in-the-workshop is thus freed by confessing and sharing her secrets with her peers, and by doing so she is constituted as the subject of the discourse of gender equity (and inequality) she speaks.

At the same time, the workshop format sets the boundary of legibility in terms of what makes sense to speak and what does not. The confessed content must derive from the confessor’s singularity as an autonomous, sovereign individual. The condition of the confession’s veracity is “the bond, the basic intimacy in discourse, between the one who speaks and what he is speaking about” (Foucault 1978: 62). This sets up the fictitious boundary between the
personal
and the
political
. Truth lies in the woman’s inner emotive self. What this pragmatic rule does is to preclude talk about anything but oneself as an individual, excluding any reference to structural, organizational, or legal issues as
political
and thus external to the workshop theme. One is not forbidden to speak about such issues, but they are understood as exogenous factors, akin to a death in the family or the weather.

In November 1991, the WGW organized workshops in Osaka and Tokyo, where MJL’s largest branch offices and headquarters (Tokyo) were located. Recruited on a voluntary basis, forty-four women participated altogether. After opening remarks by a member of the WGW, each participant was asked to write down on three different cards respectively: (1) problems she was aware of in daily work; (2) anything she was not happy with at work; and (3) anything she wanted to share with other participants. In a neoliberal global assemblage, the participants then broke into small groups, categorized the responses of individuals in the group into themes, and chose which of these they would discuss as a small group. The discussion leader of each
group
was asked to write down on an overhead transparency three points: (1) the problem-topics the group discussed, (2) the characteristics of the workplace that caused the problem(s), and (3) possible solutions and strategies for improvement.

The workshop participants almost universally pointed out the persistence of gender stereotypes and their use by men and management as an explanation of the (unfair) gendered division of labor in the workplace. The majority of the groups thus chose as a discussion topic the issue of differential job allocation in the workplace, in which even motivated and aspiring women were systematically assigned to a clerical support role, what they referred to as an assistant-like role (
ashisutanto-teki
).

One common discussion topic concentrated on
zatsuyō
, which literally means “miscellaneous affairs.” It refers to routine odd jobs in the workplace, such as serving tea, copying, filing, handling mail, ordering office supplies, and other repetitive, noncumulative, support work for core or line employees. These were exclusively assigned to women at MJL, where, I observed, gender consistently overrode age and years of service in assigning such menial tasks. Even the youngest and newest male member of the office was exempt from
zatsuyō
. A new young male employee would hesitantly but politely ask a female worker senior to him with much longer tenure at the company to order the office supplies he needed. Or, at around 11:50 a.m., when the bento lunch boxes for the workers had arrived, all the female workers would stop their work and start preparing tea for lunch. All women, whether full-time or part-time employees, temporary or permanent, shared the load of
zatsuyō
duties.

The most symbolically (and politically) charged of these
zatsuyō
duties is serving tea (
ochakumi
). A daily duty reserved for company women is to serve tea (or coffee) not only to visitors, but, more generally, to colleagues and superiors, throughout the day. At MJL, it was not uncommon for female workers to serve tea three times a day. In some offices, women might serve tea to as many as sixty people. All of this was an everyday material reminder of the differential treatment of women in the office and the deferential position they were expected to take.

The workshop discussions also invoked the familiar figure of the male supervisor who nipped his female subordinate’s aspirations in the bud. It was agreed that the company-wide promotion of the idea of equal opportunity would not change a bit of his traditional view of women. He would continue
to
treat women as disposable temporary labor, as support staff with no chance of promotion, and to show no sense of duty for or even interest in mentoring female subordinates.

It is undoubtedly the case that women share more or less similar job dissatisfaction in their shared position in the stratified labor process. But serving tea was problematized as a workplace issue for women not only because it was universally experienced but, more important, because it was “legible” and “speakable” within the discourse of gender equity, something that made sense to talk about. In contrast, for example, none of the participants brought up the issue of salary, much less promotion. The workshop organizers also confirmed this observation and offered a couple of explanations. One was that salary and promotion were matters not precisely “about gender.” One organizer surmised that women wanted to talk about things over which they felt that they had some control. One participant also said to me that it was not about money, but, as she put it, “I think all they [women] want is to feel their job more worth doing (
yarigai ga aru
) and to have others recognize (
mitomeru
) how hard and seriously they are working.”

The WGW pointed out the importance of creating an environment that supports women’s career development and their effort to balance work and family. But this “privilege” of women-friendly programs can be enjoyed
only if
women themselves understood the achievement of equal opportunity in a two-way model. First, a woman employee must have a genuine commitment to her career; second, (male) managers must be willing to nurture and train female subordinates. For the WGW, then, the key was smooth communication (
enkatsu na kominikēshon
) between female subordinates and male superiors. At the end of its term, the WGW concluded its presentation at the annual business managers’ meeting as follows: “We need to strive toward the implementation of the MJL ‘Guiding Principle’ by recognizing each other’s role in smooth communication between superiors and subordinates and person-to-person.”

The surveys, workshops, and task forces objectified the firsthand accounts of attitudes, values, experience, feelings, and other “truths” about female workers, truths that were then used to guide the conduct the female workers—much of it, of course, as
self
-guidance. Following up on the WGW report at the annual business managers’ meeting, in July 1992, the Personnel Department organized a three-day retreat, “The First Strategic On-the-Job-Training Workshop,” targeting midlevel managers, or section chiefs
(
kachō
). They were the direct supervisors of the female clerical workers, with whom they had everyday, face-to-face contact, and they held the interlocutor equally responsible—along with their female staff members—for “smooth communication.” With the goal of improving their managerial skills and sensitivity to training, mentoring, communicating, and working with female workers, the main activity of the workshop was group discussion and an analysis of the data produced in the previous workshops, surveys, and task forces on equal opportunity.