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to be friendly to irregular workers. In other words, the union’s attitude to irregular workers is
strongly related to the relationship between employer and labor union.
Interestingly, this relationship fit to balance theory. Above figure 1, 2 are modified figure from
Nakanish’s paper “Using Balance theory to Understand Social Agents” (Nakanishi et al., 2002)
These figures imply that relationship of labor union, employer and irregular work keeps the
balance as Heider’s Balance Theory. Heider said,
“In the relation of three people or triadic, balance state occurs when all sign multiplication of its
sentiment relation charges positive. In this way, balance state occur when there are sentiment
relations with signs all positive ((+)×(+)×(+)=(+)), or two negative and one positive ((+)×(-)×
(-)=(+))…”(Heider,
1946: p.109).
Proceeding from this fact, we can guess solidarity is a special consequence of the balanced
relation: figure 2. Likewise the labor unions’ exclusive attitude to irregular workers is a
consequence of the balanced relation: figure 1, too. And overall, these three agents relationship
keeps the balanced state in different ways.
Mechanism for Balancing
Then ‘how are these two balanced?’ This is the essential puzzle for this research. And as a micro-
mechanism for this phenomenon, most plausible approach is understanding the union’s attitude
as a result of organizational strategy according to a bounded rationality which March and Simon
introduced first(March & Simon, 1958).
The balanced state like figure 1, shows so called crack between regular workers and irregular
workers as Kia Motors union and so on. It is too early to condemn for union’s attitude, more
important than result is the reason. Then, why unions show exclusive attitude toward irregular
Convention