“Will these old men understand me?” The relation between labor unions and LGBTQ people in Japan.

Abstract: Japanese labor unions have the last many decades experienced diminishing union density and loss of political power. In contrast, the group of workers who have part-time or limited contracts, so-called non-regular workers, has simultaneously grown. Meanwhile, Japanese LGBTQ people are overrepresented within non-regular work, the same workers who often cannot join unions, due to a union culture of mostly representing full-time regular workers. This thesis asks the question; is there a possibility that both LGBTQ people and unions can benefit from supporting each other. Because of limited literature in this field, the thesis takes one step back. It simply looks at the relation between non-regular LGBTQ people and labor unions, opening this field for further studies. Through interviews and qualitative content analysis made with LGBTQ people and labor unions, the study finds that Japanese labor unions only recently started to address LGBTQ issues. The conservative image unions have kept LGBTQ people away from joining them, and most unions do not seem like an obvious ally for LGBTQ people's voices to be heard from.