That means a talented early-30s engineer can easily out-earn a laggard several years his senior -- sacrilege under seniority pay plans.
Older workers have traditionally earned more, reflecting the weight of seniority in pay scales, so the cost of providing final-salary pension benefits for them has been higher.
In the car industry, Mitsubishi Motors wants to abolish its entire seniority-based pay structure this April.
ECONOMIST: Deflation is transforming Japan's annual pay rituals
Full-time workers are also unionized and protect their privileges, such as seniority-based pay.
This will make it even more necessary to scrap the seniority-based pay system, because keeping older workers on will be prohibitively expensive.
Because of a seniority-based pay system, this puts a huge strain on business costs, leaving less money to provide young people with training and good jobs.
Hitachi and Matsushita, another big consumer-electronics firm, are proposing to end automatic seniority-based pay increases after workers reach a certain age, and to shift to performance-based pay structures instead.
ECONOMIST: Deflation is transforming Japan's annual pay rituals
The workers were angered when the city announced last month that it could no longer require private companies bidding for transportation contracts to hire drivers by seniority and protect previous pay rates.
As well as seeking job-security, sararimen have traditionally looked to the workplace to give them status, a social life and pay set according to seniority.
As for the other potential hurdle--the 12, 000 pilots at the two carriers haggling over the seniority rules that would determine future pay raises and desirable schedules--is just a hiccup.
Or they could opt for a smaller pay bump and still lose some seniority rights.
The new partners pay employees for performance rather than seniority.
That is hard to do under the old system, with its emphasis on seniority and promotion as the main routes to higher pay.
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Those who choose instead to be paid solely on seniority would retain their job security but receive much smaller pay increases.
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In most firms, both pay and holidays also tend to go up with seniority.
Many civil service contracts require annual pay increases for staff, in line with their seniority and length of service.
Along with performance-related pay has come a greater emphasis on meritocratic rather than seniority-based promotion.
The action by 2, 800 staff (nearly half the workforce) at SC First Bank Korea is ostensibly over a merit-pay scheme, which would be at odds with Korean seniority-based traditions.
It means bringing quality teachers in -- it means bringing quality teachers to the neighborhoods that need them the most, because right now a lot of what happens is, is that some of the best teachers, as they get seniority, they move on to the places -- the school districts that pay better and, frankly, are easier to teach.
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By next year, Kim will have put every employee on a pay-and-promotion system that is performance-based, trashing the traditional seniority-based system that Korea inherited from the colonizing Japanese.
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