But even for government workers, lifetime employment is increasingly less common.
Japanese companies have long been expected to offer their workers lifetime employment, a system long upheld as vital to the country's social cohesion.
The unions and the left in general vehemently oppose any challenge to the current labor law, which effectively guarantees most workers lifetime job security.
As mentioned earlier, changes in the redistributive nature of the pension system affect workers' lifetime income modifying their preferences for the legal retirement age.
Using changes in earnings induced by changes in the structure of the U.S. Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), they show that under a model of learning by doing, the EITC increases workers' lifetime earnings, whereas under the formal training model, the EITC actually reduces earnings, once the tradeoff between work and training is taken into account14.
Social Security is supposed to provide income insurance based on a workers' lifetime of employment.
Yet a worker's lifetime earnings are hurt more by a job loss in a weak economy.
Technically, a worker's lifetime history of taxable earnings, rather than the taxes themselves, traditionally determine a person's old-age benefits, with more lifetime earnings sometimes resulting in more benefits (this book by the longtime Social Security actuary Robert J. Myers has all the details).
At that point, Social Security would bear little resemblance to today's program, where benefits are based on a worker's lifetime earnings.
Many economists say that Italy's growth is hampered by labor laws that protect older workers with lifetime tenure, leaving younger workers living on temporary contracts with low salaries and little job security.
