Two rationalization plans, and the shrinking of the Innoshima and Mukaishima yards (1986)

What it tried to protect decided the order of the cuts

A company that had raised the banner of “management for a million people” began with 1,260 people in indirect departments. And of those, 510 were to go by not replacing natural attrition and the rest by secondment to affiliated firms; dismissals were not in the plan. How a management that had promised, in its labour agreement, the peaceful settlement of working conditions arranged the order of its cuts is visible right there. President Nagata Keisei had been calling for an appropriate operating rate, a reduced dividend and restraint on wage rises since the spring of 1972, so his reading of the crisis can hardly be called late. What was late was not the reading but the speed of reducing people.

The price of that speed, though, was paid not by head office but by Innoshima and Mukaishima. When word of the second rationalization plan of 1986 reached the towns, what swirled through them was shock, anger and a kind of emptiness; a 46-year-old who took voluntary redundancy said it was hell if you left and hell if you stayed. Employment eventually fell to about a third of its peak, and the earnings came instead from machinery, engines and plants. The gentler you make the cutting, one might say, the later you finish cutting — and the later it is, the more the pain collects in the towns where the yards stand.