Given such inflexibility, it's no surprise that Japanese workers are a quarter less productive than Americans.
The dead hostages included seven Japanese workers and three energy workers each from the U.S. and Britain.
In a country packed with electronics firms, Japanese workers of course have lots of computers on their desks.
The U.K. confirmed that British citizens were being held, and Japan said Japanese workers were among the hostages.
In contrast, the average hours of work for American and Japanese workers is nearly identical due to comparable tax rates on earnings and consumption.
Japanese workers are extremely obedient, hard-working and loyal to their group.
Reflecting on my time in Tokyo, it seems to me that now is a time of profound choices for Japanese workers, and particularly the Generation Y of Japan.
As a result, only 22% of Japanese workers nowadays belong to a trade union, and most of those are in company unions organised and supported by their employers.
But then, in a Mitsubishi factory, he came across a British machine-tool salesman who told him that Japanese workers were getting three times as much out of their machines as their better paid British counterparts.
Professor Taniuchi says plainly that the idea of simply raising taxes to fund ever-increasing expenditures is self-defeating, sapping initiative of Japanese workers while pushing companies to relocate production and jobs overseas, causing growth and revenues to slow further.
Yet, costs at the plant were high compared with what Japanese companies were paying workers at their own plants.
When the recession took hold in the early 1990s, the idea that Japanese firms would make workers redundant was unthinkable.
Big Three workers get an average 46 minutes of break time per day, compared with 20 to 30 minutes for workers at Japanese-owned plants.
Meanwhile, labor observers are worried if the boycotts would affect employment of Chinese workers as Japanese factories in general are a big employer of Chinese labor force.
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Two years ago the McKinsey Global Institute published a study indicating that Japanese managers use their workers 45% less productively and capital 37% less productively than do their U.S. counterparts.
And, as in Japanese-owned factories, workers are rewarded for making the plant run efficiently.
Three workers for a Japanese engineering company that was working on the site had been contacted and were safe, said Takeshi Endo, a senior manager for JGC Corp.
Three workers for a Japanese engineering company that was working on the site have been contacted and are safe, said Takeshi Endo, a senior manager for JGC Corp.
But he will need to muster all his skills as a negotiator to wrest concessions from the company's heavily unionised workforce, whose wage packets are much fatter than those of Japanese rivals' non-unionised workers.
In the family-owned factory of Kazuya Sakamoto, which for decades has supplied parts to Sanyo, three-fifths of the 300 workers are foreigners, mainly Japanese-Brazilians.
Not only is policymaking absent and reformism on the defensive but the global slump is hitting Japanese industry particularly hard, and foreign workers foremost.
While the lifetime employment system helps ever-fewer workers, it continues to hobble Japanese business.
While the lifetime employment system benefits ever-fewer workers, it continues to hobble Japanese business.
Japanese companies are famous for looking after their workers.
Non-regular workers receive little training, so that Japanese firms run the risk of ending up with a cohort of unskilled, middle-aged non-regular staff.
The irony of the labour market in Japan is that, despite unemployment being near a post-war record, Japanese companies will soon face a shortage of young workers.
That influx of female workers "could lift the asset level of Japanese GDP by as much as 14%, " she adds.
In the two preceding decades, the productivity of American workers had grown more slowly than that of Japanese and European competitors.
It was also reported that the union leader representing the Toyota workers was murdered after reaching a deal with the Japanese company.
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Workers at the Tata Motors factory have been trained in Japanese manufacturing techniques that call for continuous improvement.
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