Rengō

▪ labour organization, Japan

in full  Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Sōrengōkai  

      (Japanese: “Japanese Trade Union Confederation”), the largest national labour confederation in Japan. Founded in 1989, it absorbed its predecessors—Sohyo, Domei, Chūritsu Rōren, and others—and brought together both private- and public-sector unions. Ideologically moderate, Rengō aims to unify and mobilize noncommunist political opposition to the ruling and generally conservative Liberal-Democratic Party. Rengō works to coordinate collective bargaining at enterprise and industrial levels; to organize unorganized workers and reverse the ongoing decline in the percentage of workers unionized; and to merge industry-level union federations into a rational structure resembling Germany's Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund. In the late 20th century Rengō had nearly eight million members.

Solomon B. Levine

 

* * *