Seventy-eight percent of Japanese People Support the Idea of Lifetime Employment

According to Japan's fourth national survey on workers' livelihoods released on March 31, 2005, 78 percent of respondents supported the idea of lifelong employment, while 66.7 percent agreed with the seniority-based wage system; both these percentages increased over the previous survey in 2001. These results showed that people are reassessing the more traditional Japanese employment practices such as lifelong employment or seniority-based pay scales.

It was conducted by the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training (JILPT), which surveyed 4,000 people 20 years old or older across the nation over about a one-month period toward the end of August, 2004.

More than 40 percent of both male and female respondents agreed that "business comes before pleasure for men and family comes before work for women." About 60 percent of respondents agreed that "business comes before pleasure," including 20 percent who thought that men should give priority to work and women should place emphasis on both work and family.

With respect to diversity in work contracts, although respondents agreed that there are good and bad aspects to working as a non-regular employee (part-time, temporary, contract, or on-loan employment), for themselves personally, 100% of regular employees and 70% of non-regular employees answered that they would prefer regular employment.



Posted: 2005/06/28 06:45:26 AM
Japanese version