JILAF | Japan International Labour Foundation

JILAF invited seven persons (including four women) from four organizations in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay to visit Japan from February 13 to 26.

The participants engaged actively in the two-week program, which included lectures, visits, discussions, and reports by the participants on the labour situation in their countries.
In particular, they showed much interest in topics where Japan differed from their own countries, such as the characteristics of labour-management relations, the structure of the labour movement, the spring labour offensive and collective bargaining, and the productivity movement. These topics stimulated many questions and lively discussions.
At Hello Work Kanagawa, which the participants visited in the Rengo Ishikawa program, they learned about the support setup for unemployed persons and others, actually manipulating the job-search terminals themselves and experiencing employment consultations.
In the visit to an industrial organization, the participants went to the Japan Post Labour Union, where they deepened their understanding of the organization and its main activities. After that, they visited the Japan Post Shin-Tokyo Branch and the JP Tokyo International Branch, where they inspected the work processes, such as the sorting and delivery of domestic and international mail. They also held lively discussions with branch union executives on the everyday activities of the union.
In the second half of the program the participants also heard a lecture from Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) on labour-management relations in Japan as seen by management, so the visit was a good opportunity for them to study labour-management relations in Japan from the perspectives of both labour and management.