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This book details the new forms of workers' protest and opposition that have developed as Japan's economy has transformed over the past three decades and highlights their impact upon the country's policymaking process. Drawing on a new dataset charting protest events from the 1980s to the present, the book produces the first systematic study of Japan's new precarious labor movement. It details the movement's rise during Japan's post-bubble economic transformation and highlights the different and innovative forms of dissent that mark the end of the country's famously non-confrontational industrial relations. In doing so, moreover, the book shows how this new pattern of industrial and social tension is reflected within the country's macroeconomic policymaking, resulting in a new policy dissensus that has consistently failed to offer policy reforms that would produce a return to economic growth. As a result, the book argues that the Japanese model of capitalism has therefore become increasingly disorganized.

Exchange rate policy has profound consequences for economic development, financial crises, and international political conflict. Some governments in the developing world maintain excessively weak and “undervalued” exchange rates, a policy that promotes export-led development but often heightens tensions with foreign governments. Many other developing countries “overvalue” their exchange rates, which increases consumers' purchasing power but often reduces economic growth. This book argues that the demands of powerful interest groups often dictate government decisions about the level of the exchange rate. Combining case studies of China, Argentina, South Korea, Mexico, and Iran with cross-national statistical analyses, the book reveals that exchange rate policy is heavily influenced by a country's domestic political arrangements. Interest group demands influence exchange rate policy, and national institutional structures shape whether interest groups lobby for an undervalued or an overvalued rate. A country's domestic political system helps determine whether it undervalues its exchange rate and experiences explosive economic growth or if it overvalues its exchange rate and sees its economy stagnate as a result.

This book relays a compelling narrative of the U.S. economy's struggle to emerge from the Great Recession of 2008. It explains the causes and impact on working Americans of the most catastrophic economic policy failure since the 1920s. Economic growth since the late 1970s has been slow and inequitably distributed, largely as a result of poor policy choices. These choices only got worse in the 2000s, leading to an anemic economic expansion. What growth we did see in the economy was fueled by staggering increases in private-sector debt and a housing bubble that artificially inflated wealth by trillions of dollars. As had been predicted, the bursting of the housing bubble had disastrous consequences for the broader economy, spurring a financial crisis and a rise in joblessness that dwarfed those resulting from any recession since the Great Depression. The fallout from the Great Recession makes it near certain that there will be yet another lost decade of income growth for typical families, whose incomes had not been boosted by the previous decade's sluggish and localized economic expansion. In its broad narrative of how the economy has failed to deliver for most Americans over much of the past three decades, the book also offers compelling graphic evidence on jobs, incomes, wages, and other measures of economic well-being most relevant to low-and middle-income workers. It tracks these trends carefully, giving a lesson in economic history that is readable yet rigorous in its analysis.

This book examines the implications of post-1980s market-oriented economic reform for labor systems in China, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. Adopting a critical institutionalist perspective, it explores the impact of elite economic interests and strategies, labor politics, institutional path dependencies, and changing economic circumstances on regimes of labor and social regulation in these four countries. Of particular importance are reform-driven socioeconomic and political tensions that, especially following the regional financial crisis of the late 1990s, have encouraged increased efforts to integrate social and developmental agendas with those of market reform. Using analysis of the social economy of East and Southeast Asia, the book suggests that several Asian countries may now be positioned to repeat what they achieved in earlier decades: a prominent role in defining new international models of development and market reform that adapt to the pressures and constraints of the evolving world economy.

This book examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms in Japan have reshaped the nation's corporate ideologies, gender ideologies, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of “salarymen” came to embody the “New Middle Class” family ideal. As this book demonstrates, however, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has tarnished this positive image of salarymen. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, the book shows how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have responded to such changes. The book explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of “companyism” to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic history with case studies and life stories, the book goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' ideals, and gender relations. Reworking Japan, with its first-hand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men in general and salarymen in particular.

Labor unions remain the largest membership-based organizations in major North American cities. As unions become more involved in the daily life of the city, they find themselves confronting the familiar dilemma of how to fold union priorities into broader campaigns that address non-union workers and the lives of union members beyond the workplace. If we are right to believe that the future of the labor movement is an urban one, union activists and staffers, urban policymakers, elected officials, and members of the public alike will require a fuller understanding of what impels unions to become involved in urban policy issues, what dilemmas structure the choices unions make, and what impact unions have on the lives of urban residents, beyond their members. This book serves as a road map toward both a stronger labor movement and a socially just urbanism. It presents the findings of a collaborative project which investigated how and why labor unions were becoming more involved in urban regulation and urban planning. It assesses the effectiveness of this involvement in terms of labor goals as well as broader social consequences of union strategies, such as expanding access to public services, improving employment equity, and making neighborhoods more affordable. Focusing on four key economic sectors (film, hospitality, green energy, and child care), the book reveals that unions can exert a surprising level of influence in various aspects of urban policymaking and that they can have a significant impact on how cities are changing and on the experiences of urban residents.