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The Eighty-Year System
| Article
# : |
14604 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
3,828 Words |
| Author
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David W. Plath
David W. Plath is professor of anthropology at the University
of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. |
A while ago I was talking with a young Japanese executive who had been sent by his company to do graduate study in my university's school of commerce. "You should be here as an instructor, not as a student"--I tried to tease him--"what with so many businessmen in the United States trying to imitate Japanese-style management." A smile flashed on his face, then faded quickly. "You need to take a longer view," he said. "Japan's big boom years are over, and the workaholics who built our economic miracle are getting old. The style of management that was effective in the past may not bring good results in the future. You Americans have been coping with an aging labor force since the 1950s. My company thinks that American management may have learned something about how to handle older workers that we ought to know."
I told him that in my view the United States still has not produced a ready-for-export model of how to make best use of an aging labor force in a high-tech environment. But it is true that American business and labor leaders began to be concerned about the issue soon after World War II. When my university opened an institute of labor relations in 1951, for example, one of its first projects was to call a conference on what was then a novel topic: industrial gerontology.
Japan at that time was still struggling to repair its war-shredded economy. Its labor force was young, the average worker being about 27 years old. By 1980 that average was ten years higher. Demographers are unanimous in their evaluation: Japan's population is aging more swiftly than any other in the industrial world. By the time the postwar baby-boom generation enters into its later years, around 2020 A.D., more than one out of five Japanese will have been
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