This year's "spring labor offensive" seems likely to stage somewhat of a revival after a long moribund period in which labor-management negotiations for wage raises have been perfunctory. Reversing its long-standing policy of restraining wage raises, Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), the nation's most powerful business lobby, has assumed a rather positive stance concerning such raises in a report by its management and labor policy committee for 2006.
In the 1950s, Japan's labor organizations started their annual spring labor offensive for industry-by-industry across-the-board wage raises. These annual wage negotiations raised the overall wage level of Japanese workers, thus helping to pass on the fruit of economic growth.
But the situation changed with the burst of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. In 1994, Nikkeiren (Japan Federation of Employers' Associations), which later merged with Keidanren (Japan Federation of Economic Organizations) in May 2002 to form Nippon Keidanren, announced a basic policy of forgoing wage raises. Many enterprises reduced their work force and many labor unions accepted wage freezes (although traditional age-based annual pay raises remained) or gave up demanding wage raises. Thus the spring labor offensive was frozen.