Book Description

Crucially important to both the United States and Japan, the automotive industry has served as a bellwether of national economic and social trends. Richard Wokutch compares the regulation and management of worker safety and health in the two countries and, more specifically, analyzes a Japanese automotive firm's operations in the United States. His research provides a concrete issue around which the Japanese conceptualization of corporate social responsibility can be examined. Regulation and management reflect some fundamental differences between Japan and the United States. Relations among management, labor, and government in addressing occupational safety and health are highly cooperative and nonadversarial in Japan, in sharp contrast to the situation in the United States. The Japanese use a behavioral approach to safety and health, relying on workers to follow certain rules for their own protection. Americans, however, depend on what Wokutch describes as an engineering approach, making machines and work sites as hazard-proof as possible. Japan's management practices and government policies have become objects of fascination in the West. Wokutch's careful analysis of occupational safety and health provides a lens through which those practices and policies may be focused. His book will interest those concerned with occupational safety and health and with the automotive industry, but also those who are eager to understand how some of the most effective national and corporate practices might be adapted cross-nationally.