Direct Production Workers in Japan
A workshop in Tokyo, Japan, ended with a panel of twenty Japanese and Taiwanese direct production workers. Occupations included food service worker, retail check-out clerk, hairdresser, carpenter, custodian, caregiver for young and disabled people, street traffic guard, and nurse.
We asked the panel the following questions:
What do you love about your work? The most frequent answer was “the many people I get to know and work with.”
What do you hate about your work? Answers included demands for increased production—from clerks and nurses; low pay—from several workers; lack of respect on a daily basis—from retail and food service workers; risk of injury—from caregivers, nurses, retail clerks, and a carpenter who that week had broken a finger at work. The carpenter was so happy he could come to a workshop where he could get respect, understanding, and support and not feel isolated or just ignore the injury.
How will the RC Community be different when direct production workers dominate the leadership? The overwhelmingly common answer was that workshops would have a working-class tone so that direct production workers (and other people) could be themselves and speak in front of the group without feeling self-conscious, stupid, or ashamed—could just be ordinary people.
Part of changing the tone at this workshop included translating the RC Community “Goal for Ending Classism” from academic English (and academic Japanese and Mandarin) to working-class dialect.
It is becoming clearer how important it is to “set the tone” of a workshop so that direct production workers can best make use of the theory and practice of RC.
Freeport, Maine, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion
list for leaders of working-class people