Company loyalty on the wane

Press, 15 August 1984, Page 34

Company loyalty on the wane

NZPA-Reuter Tokyo The best advice for a Japanese manager wanting -to scale the corporate pinnacle used to be simple. Put in long hours at the office, work diligently, hope someone notices - and wait. Even the most able middle manager in a large company, guaranteed a job for life, had to sit out the early years of his career waiting for immediate superiors to move on.

Lines of graduates assembled outside company headquarters every year for interviews, knowing that to be in the hall when the company president made his annual welcoming speech marked the start of monthly pay packets until the age of 55 or 60. But a Labour Ministry survey last month said this unique Japanese system was crumbling.

Frustrated young managers are prepared to resign, companies now realise the need to promote talent and doctors say the tradition causes psychological problems which have led to suicide.

A Japan Employment Development Centre survey this spring said 45 per cent of more than 1000 managers interviewed in major companies around Tokyo were fed up with doing jobs which made little use of their talent. A commodities trader who moved to a Unitd States broker’s firm after 20 years with a Japanese company said: “I just wanted to get on, to do something independently. If I could, I would really have tried to establish my own company.” While some are rearing to rise through the ranks, others are far, from happy and a prominent psychiatrist says in some cases steady promotion causes a strange mental illness which has led to suicide.

Mr Hisazaku Fujii, director of mental health at the Osaka Public Health Research Institute, told Japanese journalists he dealt with a rising number of middle-class executives who were too frightened to go to work.'

Those afflicted were dili-

gent but mediocre managers who felt they had been promoted beyond their ability. One executive, aged 35, steeled himself to go to the office one morning but never arrived. On the way he jumped in front of a train, Fujii said. The illness appeared to be unique to Japan.

The Labour Ministry survey said many companies had too few senior posts for old employees and were abandoning the seniority system. They now looked for workers with skills in electronics, biotechnology and computers.

Those who failed to measure up to modern developments were are given nice titles in order not to lose prestige, but their paypackets and responsibilties never increased, it said. Mr Toshio Shimada, a Tokyo management consultant, said some companies employed agencies to find other jobs for their unwanted executives.

“Reverse scouting is becoming one of the major

businesses of headhunting in Japan,” he said. Mr Shimada said employees shunted off to other firms tended to have lost out in office politics or found their talents becoming superfluous in a fastchanging company. “Many have specialist skills that could be put to better use with a new em-

ployer,” he said. The Nippon Recruiting Centre, a private labour exchange service, says its surveys suggest one in every three young salaried employees in Tokyo would now consider changing his job for better working conditions, especially more leisure time in a country which still works Saturdays.