The slogan used by the Japan Council of Metalworkers’ Unions sums it up: "Secure Jobs for a Secure Future.”

Throughout the country, talk and headlines hint at a seminal moment that will alter the economy’s course, with the spring shunto wage negotiations delivering the best results in three decades. International investors are watching closely to gauge whether they will convince the Bank of Japan that salaries are rising along with prices and so alter its long-standing easy-money policy.

But as the metalworkers’ union slogan shows, labor values security far more than higher salaries. That’s why, for all the hype, the shunto talks will likely be a repeat of those in the early Abenomics years — a welcome one-off pay rise that has little broader impact on the long-term wage trend. Measured in dollar terms, workers on average still make the lowest in the Group of Seven nations, having stalled in real terms for three decades. That’s making Japan a less attractive destination for the skilled overseas staff it needs to attract into key sectors such as nursing care as the nation ages. The weak yen isn’t helping, while inflation is causing real wages to drop the most in nearly 10 years.

Security is a double-edged sword for workers. It’s much harder to get rid of staff than in many other countries or cut salaries when times are tough. That means labor becomes a long-term fixed cost, one that firms are unwilling to add to even when times are good (as they have been for large companies for the past decade), which has kept pay suppressed.

"It’s not theoretically possible that companies can increase basic salaries more than the inflation rate,” said Takahide Kiuchi, economist at Nomura Research Institute and a former BOJ board member, noting that firms need to act in their economic best interests. "To reduce this kind of risk, companies always decide on more modest wage growth.”

Former BOJ Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa, often criticized for managing decline instead of pushing for growth, has noted that Japan, unlike the U.S. and Europe, prioritized maintaining jobs by cutting nominal salaries. "The payback for that was a chronic mild decline in prices that reflected falling wages,” he wrote in his memoir, "Tumultuous Times: Central Banking in an Era of Crisis." "This decline in prices and low unemployment were the two sides of the same coin.”

The current situation, with real wages falling as import costs raise inflation, is a direct result of those decisions. While the labor market has changed significantly, the system is still largely defined by this Showa-Era model of the postwar boom years and its mass hiring of nonspecialized university graduates. The biggest change during Japan’s lean years was the growth in nonregular workers — contractors and part-timers — easier to dismiss and generally paid less.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who placed higher salaries at the core of his policies, has called for increasing liquidity in the labor market and is encouraging incentives for staff to "reskill.” A government panel is set to outline its conclusions in June. The suspicion is, however, that a play-it-safe premier is unlikely to make it easier to dismiss employees or implement ideas such as a suggested new form of contract that would make explicit the costs of laying workers off.

Regardless, any system that prioritizes winners with more merit-based pay will inevitably create more losers. It’s reductive to throw around the word "reform” without considering what such changes would look like. Foreign observers often remark on Japan’s relative lack of social dysfunction, despite three decades of low growth. Contrast that with the emerging counter-example in the U.K., currently going through its own lost decade: From the political upheaval of Brexit to ongoing strikes, it seems a country far less comfortable with its decline.

In Japan, a country where 60% of workplaces report having an "old man who does nothing,” a phenomenon so prevalent in traditional offices that it has its own Wikipedia page, a lurch to a winner-takes-all system would have extensive social impact. Suicide and homelessness surged in the 1990s due to the sudden collapse not just in employment, but in social standing, as businesses failed after the economic bubble burst. Both have since dropped dramatically, as the economy recovered and firms prioritized stability. Japan also has little of the substance abuse issues seen, for example, in the U.S. opioid crisis.

It’s a repeat of this social upheaval that makes the country wary of sudden change. As unfair as it might seem to a younger generation, reforms might be best staggered over years. Qualified older workers, part of a generation least equipped to handle change, should be retained — and on their current salaries, instead of rehiring them after retirement age on greatly reduced contracts. Firms should be encouraged, too, to poach valuable veterans from other companies, just as South Korean and Chinese companies have been doing for years.

Of course, we shouldn’t forget that there are also losers from the current system. Ruling party lawmaker Rui Matsukawa highlighted that a more merit-based system would help close the gender pay gap. Suicide rose among young women when COVID-19 struck, which some have blamed on their greater likelihood to be in irregular employment, which was worst hit by the pandemic.

Japan stands at a crossroads: Inflation has forced a once-in-a-generation reckoning with rising prices and heightened the realization that its workers are not rewarded in line with international standards. But the immediate change that some hope for in spring wage talks won’t happen. The current structure served successive governments well in the decades after the bubble. The country needs to make some tough choices in revisiting that grand bargain.

Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas.