American Shuntō

It was an extraordinary, even shocking scene: The nation’s most important conservative leader and its most important labor union leadership, together in the same meeting hall, giving airtime to one another despite traditional hostility between their respective camps, and amplifying one another’s calls for a better deal for working people. The media covered it breathlessly, and hot national debates quickly followed. Did this portend a genuine, new conservative friendliness to labor? Was it merely smarter, savvier political cover for the same old anti-worker policies from an anti-labor party? Was national politics realigning in some deeper, more meaningful way?

Such was the fallout in January 2022, when Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida joined the annual New Year’s event held by RENGO, Japan’s largest and most important trade union federation.

Japanese conservatives’ experience with labor holds important lessons for American conservatives who—as was on display when Teamsters Union general president Sean O’Brien addressed the 2024 Republican National Convention—are increasingly attempting their own outreach to labor, in defiance of traditional party orthodoxy. Comparing the Japanese and American cases illuminates both the meaningful impact such symbolic gestures can have, and their even more meaningful limits.

How Japanese Conservatives Went on the Offensive

RENGO, traditionally allied with the left-of-center Japanese opposition, had generally been hostile ground for the conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Kishida’s gambit made him the first LDP prime minister to show up to the event in a decade. He took full advantage of the novelty. Addressing the gathering, he issued what in Japanese political discourse constituted a remarkably aggressive notice to businesses: “I expect wage hikes suitable for an era of new capitalism to materialize.”

Kishida began visiting unionized factory workers, despite union support for his political opponents. He appointed an opposition political candidate backed by RENGO as a special advisor, focused on strengthening ties to labor. In January 2023, Kishida visited RENGO’s New Year’s event again, once more expressing his expectation that Japanese business would raise wages, and—with the heads of two major opposition parties in attendance—declared his intention to align the LDP with labor. In October 2023, he became the first LDP prime minister to address RENGO’s formal annual convention in 16 years, repeating his message of a wage-driven virtuous cycle, and insisting that “[t]he economy’s energy comes from pay rises.”  

Kishida’s full-court press to realign Japanese conservatism in a pro-worker direction prompted a range of criticism, with many commentators complaining that it was merely an electoral play to split the union vote and weaken his competition. But in March 2023, amid Kishida’s ongoing outreach to labor, the annual shuntō suggested something more complicated was happening: business was listening. 

The shuntō, typically translated as “spring wage offensive,” is a formal annual meeting in which major employers and major unions negotiate wage increases for the year, setting expectations for a wider subset of Japanese workers. In recent decades, unions have tended to focus on job security, not wage growth, but the 2023 shuntō resulted in a wage hike of 3.6%—the strongest wage increase since the early 1990s.  

In January 2024, Kishida appeared at RENGO’s New Year’s party for the third year in a row, teaming up with RENGO’s chief to send Japanese businesses the message that wage growth must exceed inflation. Three months later, the 2024 shuntō delivered an annual wage increase of over 5%, the largest increase in over 30 years. When RENGO gathered almost 29,000 people in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park for its May Day rally two weeks later, Kishida was there to address the crowd.

Global Failures, Global Realignments

A similar story is playing out in the United States today, as conservatives increasingly reach out to organized labor. Examples of symbolic outreach from Republicans to labor abound, from Trump skipping a GOP primary debate to address striking UAW workers, to Senator Josh Hawley and now-vice presidential candidate JD Vance visiting picket lines with union workers, to Senator Marco Rubio endorsing Amazon workers’ unionization drive, to six GOP senators supporting railway union workers’ demand for sick days despite the measure being legislatively doomed.

The similarity of the American and Japanese trends offers evidence of the depth of orthodox economics’ failures. In both countries, the promises of a global embrace of free-market and free-trade fundamentalism have proved illusory. In the United States, just as in Japan, the harm done to workers by the structural failings of a frayed neoliberal consensus are so pronounced that politicians from across the spectrum—including conservatives—have become obliged to respond, or at least to seem to respond.

In Japan, real wages not only stagnated but fell between 1995-2017, while the cost of American middle-class life badly outstripped the average American worker’s income. In both countries, the political reality that the path to electoral victory runs straight through the working-class vote has come into crisp focus. Both conservative parties have attempted to adjust accordingly, whether through Kishida politely observing that “the neoliberal approach…resulted in numerous harmful effects” or Vance thunderously demanding “a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man.”   

The response from critics has been parallel in both countries, too. Free-market devotees who hold themselves as the true custodians of conservatism have bemoaned this turn as “plain old socialism” or progressivism in disguise. Outrage from the Left has also been plentiful. The Japanese Communist Party has decried Kishida’s criticisms of neoliberalism as bad faith, dishonest, and lacking in any substantive change, while the media questions whether Kishida can actually convert the LDP into a true friend of labor. Progressives in the United States have repeatedly warned that the emergent Republican economic populism is fake, not to be trusted, and a front for business-friendly Republicans to take power. And in the U.S., as in Japan, seeing conservatives and labor union leaders at the same convention sparks indignation and fury from the institutional Left.

In terms of systemic results, symbolic support has not altered the underling status quo for American workers. Individual interventions, to be sure, can make a difference by casting a spotlight onto discrete situations in a productive way—witness Sean O’Brien crediting Sen. Hawley with helping the Teamsters resolve a strike through his political support. But American workers remain as frustrated by their structural voicelessness at work as they have been. Indeed, interest in organized labor is growing even among conservative Americans, but no corresponding renaissance for organized labor has grown with it. The cost of thriving continues to outstrip wages; less than one third of American workers without a college degree have jobs that are well-paying, provide benefits and paid time off, and offer predictable earnings and schedules.  

This is perhaps to be expected. Republicans have yet to go “full Kishida” on the corporate sector, concertedly, clearly, and consistently demanding better wage and conditions for workers, backed by a legitimate threat of government action if not. It is not clear—Hawley-style one-off exceptions notwithstanding—that the corporate sector would respond even if Republicans did make such an attempt. It is certainly possible that, if President Trump or a unified cohort of Republican senators were to conduct a national tour demanding better wages on the front lawns of major employers, it could make a difference. But it remains to be seen whether the explicitly pro-labor faction will win the day.

The Prospect of an American Shuntō

The larger challenge, however, is structural. There is no American cultural or legal equivalent to the shuntō,noformalized mechanism for the nationwide exercise of worker power that political pressure could broadly influence in the first place, as a result of policy inaction. The century-old National Labor Relations Act no longer serves such a role, offering only a single hard-to-win option each workplace must individually battle for; and lawmakers have declined to improve it, replace it, or set it alongside a more meaningful range of options for organizing. The result is that less than six percent of private sector workers are union members. Republican senators could wage a pressure campaign on every picket line in America, with little impact for most American workers.

Even in Japan, Kishida’s rhetorical pressure can only achieve so much. While less severe than in the U.S., the influence of labor in Japan is diminishing, constraining even strong mechanisms like an annual shuntō—limiting the impact of political pressure can have. The deeper question facing Kishida’s government is whether it can enact a full policy agenda that strengthens workers’ voice and position. This dynamic is more pronounced in America, where business is even more resistant to symbolic pressure, and where workers have less recourse.

The real test of genuine Republican interest will be in the hard policy solutions offered—particularly those that would increase mechanisms of worker voice and power. Symbolic outreach and good rhetoric may prove politically effective. Sustained political pressure may even improve things at the margins. But the long-term solution to the pervasive voicelessness that workers experience, to the question of whether blue-collar work can provide a family wage and whether new jobs will be dignified ones with decent conditions, are mechanisms that free workers from dependence on one-off political battles, and allow them to negotiate change on their own behalf. 

This was the real message the Teamsters president sought to bring to the RNC. O’Brien praised the symbolic support that individual Republican leaders have offered the Teamsters, as any smart operator seeking to invest in new relationships should have done. But he also had something to say about the value of merely rhetorical efforts: “Most legislation is never meant to go anywhere, and it’s all talk. In America, talk isn’t cheap. It’s very expensive, and it comes at the cost of our own country.”

O’Brien’s real call wasn’t for shows of friendship but for legal change. He demanded reform to a bankruptcy code that allows private equity to eviscerate the businesses workers depend on and the local communities they live in, the overhaul of a policy environment that encourages offshoring blue-collar jobs, and the repair of a broken labor law regime that allows employers to freely squash workers’ efforts to speak for themselves. Whether the Republican Party pursues actual solutions to these challenges is more than a matter of electoral expediency. It’s a matter of whether the American political system is capable of being substantively responsive to the needs of its working-class members.