Note: This article is general information based on Japanese labor law and statistics published as of August 2026. It is not legal advice for any specific case. Details that could identify a person, company or place have been made general.
1. Why does writing "raise our pay" in a suggestion box make people call you crazy?
At a company with an employee suggestion program, a young worker wrote: "Please raise wages." The reaction around the office was, "That's crazy," and "I can't believe you wrote that."
Wait a moment.
Walking ten meters less. Cutting setup time by three minutes. Trimming stock by 2%. Lowering the defect rate by 0.1 points. All of these count as great ideas. But the moment someone suggests improving the price workers get for their work, which is their pay, people start judging that person's character.
For the company, wages are a cost. For the worker, wages are payment for their time, skills, responsibility and effort. Their interests are different. That is exactly why they negotiate. It is that simple.
Whether the request is accepted is another matter. Asking for 10% does not guarantee 10%. But "it might not be accepted" and "asking is abnormal" are two completely different things.
2. The company does nothing, and the workers silence each other
The most interesting part is not the boss shooting down a pay request. It is a worker shooting down another worker who asked.
It usually sounds like this:
- "Deliver results worth your pay first, then talk."
- "Everyone else is putting up with it."
- "The company has its own problems."
- "Say that and your review will suffer."
- "You're young. Know your place."
The company has not said a word yet. But the workplace has already produced an unpaid gatekeeper who applies the company's way of thinking before the company even speaks.
The result runs almost automatically:
Pay is low → someone asks → coworkers give them cold looks → fewer people ask → no strong request reaches the company → pay is hard to move → "Why isn't my pay going up?"
From the company's side, the cost of negotiating drops by 100%. It is such a perfect self-service system that it would win a prize as a suggestion.
Of course, "workers did not ask" is far too simple an explanation for Japan's long period of flat wages. Productivity, falling prices, passing costs on to customers, company profits, how jobs are structured, which industries dominate and how easily people change jobs all play a part. Still, there is no need to deny this much: if workers are weak at gathering their requests and negotiating, one of the forces pushing wages up becomes weaker.
3. A labor union is the workers' permanent channel for negotiating
Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare describes a labor union as a group that workers form on their own initiative, to keep and improve working conditions and to raise their economic standing. Article 28 of the Japanese Constitution protects three rights: to organize, to bargain collectively and to act collectively. [1]
It sounds difficult, but in practice it is simple.
A company is already an organization. So workers make an organization too.
One person facing a company is usually at a disadvantage in bargaining power, information and staying power. So a union collects the views of 100 or 1,000 employees. Instead of "Mr. A is angry," the message becomes "X% of our members want better pay."
The value of a union is not just a louder voice. It is that a request that used to depend on one person's personality, courage and luck with their boss becomes a system, data and an item on the agenda.
The company also cannot refuse to bargain with the union without a good reason. Firing, demoting or cutting the pay of a worker because they joined a union or took part in proper union activity is banned, and so is the company controlling or interfering with a union. These are called unfair labor practices. [1][3]
One important warning, though: the right to bargain collectively is not a right to force the company to agree. The employer must bargain in good faith, but does not have to give in. A union is not a cheat code. It is an official line of negotiation. [3]
4. Who decides whether a company has a union?
A union does not appear automatically once a company gets big enough.
A labor union is made by the workers. The Ministry says that when several workers get together they can form one freely, and that, as a rule, no approval from the government and no registration is needed. [1][2]
So the basic picture is:
Workers in the past formed a union and later generations kept it going → a company with a union.
Nobody formed one, or it faded away → a company without a union.
In Japan, the usual type is the "enterprise union," made up mainly of employees of one company. [1] That is why unions are easy to find at big companies and long-established factories. But it does not mean that the law requires a union at a big company.
In a Ministry survey at the end of June 2025, there were 22,244 single unions with about 9.927 million members, and the estimated share of employees in a union was 16.0%. [4] In other words, most people who work in Japan are not union members.
5. What actually changes when there is a union?
The biggest difference is that the workers have a permanent body to negotiate for them.
On pay, bonuses, allowances, working hours, days off, benefits, personnel rules, jobs and the workplace, the union can gather requests and talk or bargain with the company. If a written collective agreement is reached, it can have legal force. [1]
On the other hand, having no union does not mean workers have no representative at all. For example, for the "Article 36 agreement" on overtime, the company signs with the union if one represents a majority of the workers at the site. If there is none, it signs with a majority representative chosen by democratic means. [7]
But a majority representative is not a union. A person chosen for a specific legal procedure like the Article 36 agreement is not the same as a standing organization that negotiates pay and rules all year round.
Even without a union at your company, you can join an outside union, such as a general union or a local union, and ask the company to bargain. The Ministry also lists, as an example of an unfair labor practice, a company refusing to bargain only because the union includes people who do not work for that company. [3]
6. Can you keep your union membership secret from the company?
The answer is it depends. Secrecy is not automatically guaranteed.
At a company with an enterprise union, there may be dues taken out of pay, rules about who can join, or daily paperwork shared between the company and the union based on member lists. In that case it is often not realistic to hide your membership completely.
On the other hand, if you ask for advice from or join an outside union on your own, there is no system that automatically tells your employer when you join. As a rule, forming a union does not require any registration with the government either. [2]
However, if that union asks the company to bargain about your own dismissal, transfer or pay, the link between you and the union may become obvious. It is dangerous to assume you can bargain over anything and stay anonymous.
An earlier government interpretation says that a company generally cannot refuse to bargain just because it does not know the names of all the union members. [8] But that does not mean members have an absolute right to anonymity.
In practice, the smartest approach is not to bet on keeping your membership secret. It is to use a way of collecting opinions that does not tell the company who spoke up first.
For example: an anonymous survey → the union leaders add up the answers → the request is made as "the view of most members." This turns the personal event of "new employee A asked for a raise" into the system issue of "reviewing the pay level."
7. Is "not negotiating" one reason pay does not rise?
Let us not overstate cause and effect here.
"Japan's pay did not rise because unions got weaker" is not enough on its own to explain it. But "bargaining power has nothing to do with it" is also hard to believe.
The estimated union membership rate fell to 16.0% in 2025. [4] Meanwhile, the Ministry's 2026 spring pay survey of major private companies covered companies with capital of 1 billion yen or more, 1,000 or more employees and a union. Among the 428 companies whose results could be counted, the average agreed raise was 18,167 yen, or 5.18%. [5]
We cannot say from this that "the unions made pay go up 5.18%." The survey covers only big companies, and other factors such as company profits and labor shortages are also large.
But one thing is clear: a real price negotiation of request → answer → renegotiation → agreement is actually working as a system.
When companies sell goods, they normally negotiate prices by looking at material costs and supply and demand. It is strange that only the price of a person's own labor is treated as something where even stating what you want is pushy.
8. The biggest bug in improvement culture: only workers are ever asked to improve?
In factory-style improvement culture, workers are asked questions almost every day.
"Can you do it faster?"
"Can you cut waste?"
"Can fewer people make the same amount?"
"Can you lower the cost?"
Up to here, it makes sense. A business has to keep improving.
But when a worker says,
"Considering competition for new hires, keeping staff, market pay and rising prices, could we improve the pay system too?"
and the improvement program suddenly ends, something is wrong.
Improvement is not meant to be a game where only one side is optimized forever. If the company can ask workers for more productivity, it is natural for workers to ask the company for better treatment and rules. That is just balancing two sets of interests.
"Send in improvement proposals. But not about improving pay." As a suggestion system, that is a funny rule. Where you can improve things: your side only.
9. So the strongest move is to use the right channel
The conclusion is not "go into office politics alone."
It is the opposite. Build a system that does not need a hero.
For a pay request, the ideal way looks like this:
- Collect requests through an anonymous, or well-protected, survey of members.
- Turn "my pay is low" from a feeling into data: market pay, difficulty hiring, people leaving, staff makeup, prices and company results.
- Make a specific proposal on base pay, allowances or bonuses as an official union request, not under one person's name.
- Ask the company for the reasons behind its answer.
- Negotiate what can and cannot be accepted, and explain the final result to the members.
In other words, build a pipeline like this:
One person's complaint → gathering → data → official request → negotiation → agreement or no agreement
With this, "that kid is cheeky" and "Mr. A only thinks about money" no longer matter. The topic is no longer a person. It is a system.
10. Conclusion: do not make more heroes, build a working channel
Is the young worker who wrote "raise my pay" really good at their job? Is the amount reasonable? Can the company afford it? Each of these can be looked at one by one.
But a culture that treats even saying the request out loud as madness is very bad for workers.
The interests of a company and its workers are never 100% the same. That is why negotiating systems exist.
No single person needs to stand in front and become a hero.
A company is an organization.
Then workers can talk as an organization too.
And the most ironic outcome is this: coworkers keep attacking the person who asked for a raise, and the request disappears even though the company never said a single word against it.
Company: "..."
Worker A: "I'd like a raise."
Worker B: "Don't say that!"
Company: "..."
Self-suppression, complete.
One tool made to prevent exactly this is the labor union.
