Finding a voice

In Japan and France during the period of high growth, asserting one’s condition required collective mobilisation via union action. This chapter studies the content of the demands, and especially the manner in which the workers and their representatives invested in the public sphere to take public opinion as a witness. It examines how certain issues, such as gender, were central, and how particular practices by labour unions and employers, such as social surveys, acted as conduits for public opinion. As more recently illustrated by the case of China, in high-growth France and Japan unions were by no means the only form of mobilisation. Moreover, alternative forms of expression, notably literary or artistic, largely coexisted with more traditional forms, such as strikes.