Originally Posted by
Maciamo
I agree with all you wrote, except about life employment. In fact many European companies (maybe American too) guaranteed life employement until a few decades ago. In Japan, things have been changing fast in the last decade, so that life employement is becoming rarer than before. I personally know many Japanese who are job-hopping. i.e. changing job every 1 or 2 years, and I am not talking about part-time job or dead-end jobs, but career ones. So the system is the same in Japan as in the West. It just took longer to transit from lifetime employment to non-life employement for Japanese companies.
Note that life employement in Korea is more still like it was in Japan 10 or 20 years ago.
I also disagree that Western countries rely on short-term contracts. There are as many career jobs in Europe as in Japan (career is the opposite of contract, i.e. people are recruited without a time limit, until they resign or are fired). Then on a side note, if it's true that it is much easier to fire an employee in the US than in Japan, I'd say the the legislation in many Western European countries make it more like Japan than the US. The UK is the closest to the US in this regard, but Germany, France and Benelux countries are probably more like Japan.
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