Lifetime employment

The economy recession still exists and many countries have been affected. There is an increase in unemployment rate in many countries all over the world since the downside of economy situation has caused numerous businesses have to shut down themselves and laid off lots of their employees. Many employees would love this practice at this time but it makes me still wonder whether the life-time employment is a good practice for an organization.

The lifetime employment is the practice that workers become employed right after their graduation from school with a particular company. The employers will not lay off his workers if possible even in a course of depression. The employees in turn will not quit his job at this company but tend to continue working at his company until he reaches his retirement age (Koshiro, 1997).

From my point of view, lifetime employment has some advantage sides. Lifetime employment grants a job security for employees. The job security is one of the most important things for employees’ motivation. When they feel secured about their job, they could be motivated to work efficiently. Moreover, lifetime employment could help creating loyalty to their organization among employees. They will commit and contribute to both their own and their organization’s benefits. In addition, there is an opportunity to grow in your career when you have committed to and have worked for one organization for a long-term. Japan is a good example for this practice and this quite work with their culture.

All plus has a minus; most people will argue that lifetime employees or job security can lead to decrease in productivity among employees. This is because when people know that they will never be fired from their job, they might perform less efficiently since no matter how they work, they still are employed so they might not work at their maximum level of efficiency. For instance, in Thailand, most of government officers are quite a lifetime-employee. For some organizations, their officers didn’t much effort to complete their work and sometimes there is too less work to do, so they had a lot of free time.

Another negative side is the organization might not get new ideas or opinions from the new generation employees. When an organization adopts lifetime employment, the turnover of their employee would be low. This means there’s quite few numbers of new or replaced employees leading to uncompetitive workplace. New young blood employees could bring the different or new ideas to the company.

For employees themselves, they could not move to another company which might be better. This makes them lose an opportunity to gain more knowledge and experiences.

For my opinion, I don’t think a lifetime employment is good for today competitive business world. Due to many disadvantaged stated above but it still consider other factors in order to choose the most suitable practice or strategy for an organization.