Voluntary retirement in shipbuilding and steel machinery — 1,700 jobs (1987)

Telling someone you want them to leave

What changed was not the scale of the cuts but the way they were delivered. Draw the shape of the organization four years out from the medium-term plan, draw up lists of who stays and who is to go, and tell each person concerned, directly, that the company wants them to leave. The procedure described by Vice-President Hyodo took away the polite fiction that resignation is the employee’s own initiative — and took it away from the company’s side of the table. After the Plaza Accord the yen’s rise had put the bottom line in the red for two straight years.

The line, though, did not fall where it was drawn. Twenty-five of the engineers and accounting staff the company had asked to stay left anyway; the union carried the departed as special members and maintained a scheme to supplement their income until 1989. Even after 1,700 people had gone in three months, the recurring margin in the year to March 1992 was 1.5%, the lowest among the major shipbuilding and heavy-machinery firms, and by 2002 the company was heading for another across-the-board 15% pay cut. Reducing headcount and restoring earning power, these fifteen years suggest, were two different pieces of work.