DEFENCE OF JAPANESE

Taranaki Daily News, 12 November 1934, Page 9

DEFENCE OF JAPANESE

NOT A SOCIAL DUMPER LEAGUE OFFICER’S VISIT. FAVOURABLE VIEW EXPRESSED. The Governing Body of the International Labour Office, at its meeting at Geneva, had before it an important re-,, port by M. Fernand Maurette, the Assistant Director, on his mission to Japan, says the Manchester Guardian. The report, which has not been printed, deals with Japanese industrial conditions and is likely to lead to acute controversy. It takes an extremely favourable view of Japanese conditions, and there will be some comment on M. Maurette’s daring in producing so many confident generalisations after spending only eighteen days in the country. In his conclusions, M. Maurette says frankly he is in agreement with the unanimous opinion of all the Japanese he met or whose writing he read—that Japan does not practise “social dumping.’’ © If by analogy with commercial dumping, an operation which consists in exporting goods at less than the cost of production plus a fair profit, social dumping is defined as the operation of promoting the export of national products by decreasing their cost of production as the result of depressing conditions of labour in the undertakings which produced them, or keeping those conditions at a low level, if they are already at such a level, then defined in that way, social ’ dumping does not exist in Japan. Conditions of labour have not been depressed in the large undertakings working for export in order to decrease costs of production. Indeed, in proportion as production has been rationalised and technical improvements introduced, and in proportion as the sale of those products has increased, conditions of labour have been improved. There is no reason to suppose that the improvement will not continue. Conditions of labour may perhaps have been temporarily depressed (I did not myself see this, but many credible wit- - nesses admitted it to me) in certain small undertakings where they were already less advanced than in large undertakings, • as the result of unbridled competition and the desire to sell'goods at any price. The reason is, however, that the undertakings In question were unsound, and were not organised in a way which corresponds to the principles of modern society. The Government has taken serious measures to supervise such undertakings. There is every reason to believe that their number will diminish and that they will finally disappear and be replaced by large undertakings where satisfactory conditions of labour prevail. JAPAN’S ADVANTAGES. M. Maurette says the first cause of the expansion of Japan’s export trade was admitted by all to be the fall in the / value of the yen. This he calls “an accidental and temporary factor,” which, though it encourages exports, bears heavily on imports. The ultimate cause is “undoubtedly to be found in commercial and technical organisation.” He was also impressed “by the working capacity of the Japanese worker, who is full of enthusiasm, better fed than in the past, and well educated.” M. Maurette goes on to sketch (inconclusively) Japan’s population problem, to note the absence of trade unionism, and to discuss whether the family conception of life can survive large-scale industrialism. He speculates whether, if the cotton factories increase, they will find it so easy to find their annual contingent of girls of 15 "equal in number to the contingent of girls of 20 whom they discharge.” He makes various suggestions to encourage the Japanese Government to try to comply with the Washington Hours Convention, but points out that while the system of the convention is already in force in many of the large undertakings, there are so many small undertakings that not quite half the Japanese workers would benefit from Its application. The body of M. Maurette’s report is devoted to a brief account of the factories and works he saw. He was much impressed by their high degree of mechanisation. He saw girls supervising 30, 40 and even 60 cotton looms. He notes that in the better factories the actual working tune of the operative is often only eight or eight and a half hours a day, with a weekly or fortnight nest day. He gives some remarkable figures to show how, in spite of the reduction in working hours, output per worker has increased. In 1932 the average weaver working 11 hours a day produced 18,000 yards; in 1932 working 8J hours he produced 50,000 yards. With the same reduction in hours the cotton spinner’s production increased 12 bales to 22. The silk spinner’s hours fell from 12 to 10, but production rose from 18 kwan to 31. In the coalmines production per head almost doubled in the decade. M. Maurette agrees that nominal wages are extremely low, but goes into much detail on bonuses and allowances. The general standard of living is, however, “very low” because Japan is a poor country. He says that the welfare and other, amenities represent a considerable saving on the worker’s budget. He quotes the estimates of a cotton spinning company that a worker who receives a daily cash wage of li yen is given at least half as much again in the form of an annual bonus, cheap accommodation in a dormitory, and cheap food supply, and that in the case of a woman worker receiving 60 sen, the additional advantages would almost doub’e her earnings. CHEAP LIVING. Of the cost of living he says:— A seat in the theatre or the cinema may be had for a few sen. Six pairs of cotton socks cost 1.20 yen; a complete meal in the dining-car of a train costs 50 sen. Th? manner of life of the Japanese people is extremely simple. It is obviously a matter for the Japanese themselves .if they prefer houses which are almost without furniture iwhich is by no means thp same thing .~s houses furnished without taste) to houses full of furniture, if they would rather sleep on a mat. than on a bed with a mattress, and live on fish, rice, and vegetables rather than on a heavy <’iet including plenty of meat and sugar. Describing the “family conception” in industry, he tells how he saw all tha workers of a faotory (the Isurumi Bicycle Works), without exception, performing a series of rhythmic exercises to music around the Japanese flag under the eye or the manager during the morning break of a quarter of an hour. A large section of the report consists in summaries of M. Maurette’s interviews with different classes on Japanese industrial probler.s and future—an interesting symposium, which, however, reveals little ■ variation in the opinions expressed by - Government, Labour, capitalist or acade--1 mic opinion.