Świadczenia socjalne w przedsiębiorstwie japońskim

Abstract

The foregoing chapter is based on the findings of studies conducted by the Japanese Ministry of Work annually and dealing with "System of socio-welfare benefits in manufacturing and mining companies". They indicate that a Japanese employer interferes politically in all spheres of an employee ’s life performing an organizing and financing role. Differences, which occur here, concern the range of benefits and the size of companies. For instance, about 100 per cent of the biggest companies (with workforce exceeding 50 000 persons) were providing housing resources for their employees as compared with only 54 per cent of small firms. The situation looked similar in provision of sport facilities (swimming-pools, sport-fields, gymnastic halls). The firm becomes not only a place of gainful employment for employees but also a community, in which current and long-term individual and family goals are being realized. Reconciliation of individual interests with corporate goals has led to developing a sense of an individual's identity with own firm, growth of satisfaction with a position held within a company and pride of belonging to it. However, the seventies witnessed some disturbances in this symbiosis, which were caused by consequences of the oil crisis, increased share of the population in post-productive age, and increased share of highly-qualified labour. As it could be expected, the above phenomena resulted in modifications in the system of socio-welfare assistance, growth of personal costs and necessity of incurring additional costs connected with transferring less efficient employees to other jobs. The studies on socio-welfare expenditure reveal an increasingly smaller interest of Japanese firms in financing or expanding culture centres, sport facilities or hospitals attached to particular firms. There has also taken place a change in employees’ attitude to their places of work. General rise of incomes and living standards, and a bigger amount of leisure time have led to differentiation of employees’ requirements. That concerns, in particular, young people, who do not wish to be controlled by their firms also in a supra-productive sphere of their life. The main cause of these changes must be sought in decay of a traditional paternalistic family structure, and within it - the treatment of an employer as a "family head", which is replaced by a modern family of the so-called "atom-age" type.