Guaranteed Employment in 2010

The adage today is that people switch careers the way their parents switched jobs.

Are there any young people today interested in working for the same company for life?

Not many I talk to are interested in that...but look at this.

Today employee commitment is dramatically less strong then it was for our grandparents. 1 in 2 full time working adults believe that the management team they work for does not have them at their best interest. Besides a few examples of Japanese companies having workers for a lifetime, not many young people seriously consider working for a company for a lifetime.

There's a real disadvantage to that too. Think about how many young people take jobs that IN NO WAY give them relevant skills for their dream profession. What does 5 years working as a waiter do for you if you want to be an analyst? Why work in retail during college, if your goal is to become a doctor. Of course, people want to make money, and they are in college to find the skills to be relevant to an organization.

Here's the example I want to discuss. A little company called Lincoln Electric showed guaranteed employment is possible, and that it has been possible through several recessions and depressions. Frank Koller in his book "Spark: How Old-Fashioned Values Drive a Twenty-First Century Corporation", writes about how the 3,300 employees at Lincoln Electric survive with this unusual system. Workers here make roughly $55,000 dollars a year, and yearly bonuses are about $30,000. Most of these workers are involved in piecework, laboring in a factory setting to create manufactored parts.

This is frankly unheard of today!

Consider this. Not one employee has ever been laid off (yes, some have been let go for performance reasons), and the company continues to hire great workers even today. In 2010! John Lincoln launched the company in 1895, and early on espoused a philosophy of valuing the worker.
Koller writes "At his core, James Lincoln believed every company had to earn the right to expect hard work from its employees, but at the same time he was absolutely convinced that no employer could expect to motivate his employees to work hard just by paying money. He would argue, passionately, that first and foremost employees wanted to be respected as human beings who were engaged in a process of creating a worthwhile product."

Lincoln Electric continues to maintain it's principles. They did not collapse during the Wall Street chicanery of the late 1990s, 2000s. They did not have to unionize because of distrust between the workers and management. During times of hardship workers would have hours reduced to 32 a week. Consider that the CEO would make only 16x more then their lowest paid worker. That a huge difference from the inequality of pay between most fortune 100 companies whose CEO makes over 300X what the the lowest worker makes.

Is there a lesson to learn from Lincoln Electric today?