Lifetime employment

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Lifetime employment or Permanent employment (japanese. shūshin koyō 終身雇用) has been the rule in big Japanese companies beginning with the first economic successes in the 1920s. It gives Japanese the important feeling of job security. A high demand for the few available engineers forced companies to bind these employees to the company. The collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble and the following crisis in the 1990s slightly weakened the practice. It has never been used in small Japanese companies. In 2003, 83% of major Tokyo firms still had policies of lifetime employment^{[citation needed]}. The practice has been strengthened in the past years as the economic situation has significantly improved.