On a recent Saturday, some 80 delegates from the National Union of General Workers, Tokyo South, trudged through cold rain to gather at a conference hall near Mount Fuji for their annual meeting. Greetings were kept brief and to the point. After all, with the sour economy putting such pressure on unions, everybody had a lot on their minds.

It soon became clear just how much. Reporting on working conditions at their companies, one speaker after another shared stories of forced retirements, unreachable production quotas and hours of unpaid overtime. One word that popped up a lot was "kaiko" -- a blunt Japanese word for firing that contrasts with the more delicate expression preferred by managements: "jinin sakugen (staff reduction)."

But as grim as the testimonials may have been (and despite an unpleasantly strong earthquake in the afternoon), the mood among Tokyo South members was nonetheless one of cautious optimism.

For one, attendees heard about the union's recent campaign against a reform bill aimed at rolling back the Labor Standards Law. A parliamentary speech by a top Tokyo South official was credited for limiting the reach of the new statute.

And some of the many foreign members present -- a full third of the attendees -- described ways in which they, too, were making inroads. Canadian-born Douglas Marvin, an English teacher at Tokyo Metropolitan Kokusai High School, recounted his victory last month when the Tokyo Bureau of Education recognized his demand that all foreign assistant English teachers in Tokyo public high schools be given paid days off in accordance with the law. The development could affect about 200 schools.

Japanese labor today is a shadow of the aggressive movement for workers' rights seen in decades past. NUGW Tokyo South, however, is a good example of the handful of vibrant grassroots unions around the country which, though often strapped for cash and relatively modest in scale, are proving that workers here have not completely thrown in the towel.

A union full of fight

Tokyo South calls itself a "fighting union." Representing 2,600 workers -- with a large contingent from the publishing and foreign-language school businesses -- it has engaged in more disputes at its 70 branch unions over the years than anybody can remember. Today, it is currently involved in eight -- seven of them at the court level.

The union says its pugnacity distinguishes itself from the "enterprise unions" that account for most of Japan's organized labor. Organized company by company, and often with heavy input from management, enterprise unions have become increasingly reluctant to confront management head-on, and amid the ongoing economic slump they appear to be dead in the water.

Not so with Tokyo South. It and similar grassroots unions have recently been showing signs of brisk activity. Indeed some experts have gone so far as to say those stirrings are the only sign of activity in the Japanese labor movement.

While Japan's long-declining union membership now threatens to fall below 20 percent of all workers, aggressive recruiting at Tokyo South managed to bring in more than 200 new members this past year. This fact, combined with the union's recent grievance victory, seemed to boost their sense of quiet enthusiasm.

"The country is struggling. Companies, too. Nobody's doing well. That's precisely the reason not to give up," said 60-year-old veteran union activist Tadaaki Onodera. "You start from here."

Workers the world over are in rut. Union membership in Britain and the United States has failed to recover from declines following a wave of antiunion initiatives in the 1980s by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and analysts say that rising wage inequality in those countries is partly attributable to this fall. (Membership was 29.5 percent in the United Kingdom in 1999 and 13.5 percent in the United States in 2001, according to the most recent figures from the International Labour Organization.) Meanwhile, labor organizations in some countries are putting up with government interference, while others endure physical threats from union-busting paramilitary units.

Still, despite the obstacles, workers in other countries appear more willing than the average Japanese to band together and make demands of management. In the U.S., unions rejecting layoffs, wage cuts and reduced benefits in April pushed American Airlines to the brink of bankruptcy before agreeing to 11th-hour concessions.

The following month, all but one of France's major unions went on strike against proposed pension reforms, forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights and bringing travel to and from the country to a standstill.

Also that month, widespread protests in India against the privatization of state-owned assets brought Calcutta to a standstill. And closer to home, in South Korea, where sparks fly between union militants and riot police on a regular basis, a prolonged strike at the domestic subsidiary of Swiss food manufacturer Nestle resulted in lockouts.

Japan, too, once had its fair share of homegrown activism. The country's first attempt at organized labor was in the late 1890s when Fusataro Takano and Sen Katayama, students of the labor movement in the U.S., began to organize workers using the American model. Out of these early efforts grew unions representing printing shops, metalworkers and railway engineers. Various other labor groupings came and went. In 1921, disputes over the right to bargain collectively erupted at the Mitsubishi and Kawasaki shipyards in Kobe, but ended in failure for the workers when authorities refused to budge.

Completely suppressed by the militarist government during World War II, labor unions re-emerged after Japan's surrender, when they were promoted by the Occupation administration as organs of democratization. Membership grew from zero in 1945 to more than 3 million a year later, the fastest explosion in unionization anywhere. The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed an aggressive -- and successful -- push by certain militant enterprise unions to secure better conditions for workers.

The most notable result, starting in 1955, was the shunto, the yearly "spring offensive" in which the country's unions meet with management to haggle over pay and benefits. The practice continues to this day and is the annual highlight of Japanese labor activity.

Over time, though, labor unions brought their demands into closer alignment with management policy; what strikes do occur today are short-lived and largely symbolic. This cozy system, which keeps labor negotiations in-house, may be effective at maintaining the peace, but it discourages workers at separate employers from coordinating their demands, for instance, to pursue higher wages across the board. Japan's last major industrial labor action occurred between 1985-87, when two unions -- the National Railway Workers and the All National Railway Locomotive Engineers -- resisted the privatization of the Japan National Railway, in vain.

In a slumber

Nowadays, mainstream unions have gone quiet, and big business sees little need to offer concessions. Just before shunto negotiations this year, Hiroshi Okuda, chairman of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren), told the nation's labor leaders that "economic policy and business management must be resolute . . . Without that there will be no recovery, no support for employment, no expansion of jobs."

If labor took Okuda's remarks as a directive, then it should be no surprise that key unions in the past year decided to forego pay-scale increases, called "base-ups." Some have watched helplessly as their employers also reduced seniority-based pay. Rather than fight for wage increases, the unions focused instead on trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of jobs overseas and preventing pay from actually falling.

This flexible stance, though welcomed by management, was viewed by some analysts as a sign that the shunto bargaining mechanism -- considered Japanese unions' raison d'e^tre -- had collapsed. "Labor is the weakest it's been in the post-World War II period," said Makoto Kumazawa, a professor of labor economics at Konan University.

The reasons behind labor's humiliation are many, and they are largely economic in nature. There was the obvious fallout from the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s and the strain that the resulting mountains of bad debt placed on corporations and, by extension, their employees. And competition from China and other Asian manufacturing rivals translates into lower revenues, and thus less money to spend on hiring the full-time employees who have traditionally represented the backbone of Japanese unions.

Which is where social factors come in. Among the dwindling numbers of regular workers left behind at mainstream unions, increased competition between employees fearful for their jobs -- in no small part due to the performance-based pay scales imported from the West -- has eroded the solidarity necessary to bend management to its demands, said Kumazawa.

"It's every man for himself. The thinking nowadays is that only you can raise your income," said Kumazawa. "The notion of protecting wages with the backing of the union has fluttered away on the wind."

The implications for Japanese society are ominous, warned Hirohiko Takasu, a 13-year veteran organizer with Tokyo South. Cutting costs through downsizing or relying on part-time labor, he said, is creating a stratum of society that lacks satisfactory wages, benefits or job security. This, he believes, is slowly placing the country's future in peril.

"Homelessness has increased, as has the number of people working part time or drifting from job to job and earning inconsequential salaries," said Takasu. "That more workers are falling into this category presents a serious problem for Japan."

Government statistics highlight a striking trend toward job insecurity. According to the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry, in the April-June period of 2003, 14.8 million Japanese workers worked part time, by contract, as temporary staff or in other unstable, nonregular positions, accounting for 30 percent of all nonexecutive workers, up from 28.5 percent the previous year.

"We are exploited when convenient and discarded when no longer needed," Tokyo South President Yujiro Hiraga told his comrades.

Foreigners heed the call

Mainstream unions, which are primarily composed of full-time staffers, have been slow to lure other types of workers into their fold. (Only 2.7 percent of part-timers are currently organized.) Tokyo South, on the other hand, considers the transient elements of the labor force a priority. And they need not be Japanese: Tokyo South officials said foreigners are among the most enthusiastic members of their growing ranks.

Foreigners like Bill (not his real name), a foreign computer programmer who worked for the past 12 years at a U.S. technology supplier's Japan unit before being told in April that he was falling dangerously behind in his work.

The only way he could save his job, he was told, was to partake in a special work assignment that would test his abilities. He suspected his manager was arbitrarily targeting him for dismissal in an attempt to cut the payroll, and told him so. But knowing he had little choice, he acquiesced.

"I said, give me the most difficult job you have," recounts Bill. "They gave me their best shot" -- a challenging programming project. "I finished it on Sept. 16, which was six days ahead of schedule."

His reward? They fired him.

"There are six managers on one side of the table and I'm on the other side by myself," said Bill. "They say, 'Well, we reviewed everything and you failed on all points. We've given you every last chance and there's no hope for improvement. Therefore your employment will be terminated.' "

"At that point," continued Bill, "I called the union and I wrote a grievance charging them with unfair labor practice."

Bill began studying workers' rights and before long he was convinced his company was violating labor law. Emboldened, he decided to establish a local branch of the union at his company.

Starting from scratch hasn't proven easy. Coworkers are concerned that they will put their jobs at risk by joining a union and have been hemming and hawing; currently only one -- a Japanese -- has joined. According to NUGW regulations, though, they need at least one more before applying for official branch status.

Bill also believes his employer may be playing dirty tricks. A manager, he says, sat on his vacation request for two months, possibly in the hopes that he would take the vacation without clearance and thus create firm grounds for dismissal.

With resistance from management building and still too few people to start the local branch, the situation "is critical," said Bill. But like his partners at Tokyo South, he's looking on the bright side of things. Initially, only a few coworkers were aware of his efforts to start a union branch. But more recently, as many as 12 colleagues -- all Japanese -- have shown up for the weekly law study groups he holds in secret. "The interest and awareness is much greater today than it was three weeks ago," said Bill.

The first steps toward organizing his shop were daunting, but Bill claims he is already seeing results.

Management, he said, began to treat him with a certain deference after he drew the support of Tokyo South. That fact alone has strengthened his belief -- the belief that attracted him to a fighting union in the first place -- that strength lies in numbers.

By the sound of it, he's almost looking forward to his next tussle with personnel.

"When we get our third member, it'll be too easy to walk all over them."