What time or decade did companies and businesses stop desiring lifetime workers?

When they realized they could save money,by getting rid of old and worn out employees.

@SQUEEKY2 When they realized they could save money,by getting rid of old and worn out employees.
These “old and worn out” employees use to be the companies gold mine of experience.

Wow @Hypocrisy_Central. That very conversation happened at my old job on a nationwide group conference call. 20 thousand people on that call and the president of the company says that those days are no longer. No one gets a watch, people are transient, employees usually last 5 years and move on. This was in the mid 2000’s. My whole office was stunned. The medium years of service in my office at that time was 25 years. This was in the insurance industry.

1950’s was a golden age for workers. 1986 when the market collapsed. But i’m not sure.

@Hypocrisy_Central That was true but now they are less productive,want higher wages and more likely to get hurt on the job, so throw them out to the wolves and save bucks, nothing personal it’s just business as the old saying goes.

The late 1980’s. The cost reduction consultants were running around collecting big pay checks.

It’s a result of globalization.

Until the 70s, American workers mostly competed against American workers.

Now we compete with third-worlders.

The effects are mixed – we get cheap consumer goods but we don’t get paid to make the goods.

Blame Wal-Mart.

The 90s. Rapidly changing technology means the skills you’ve learned in school and early in your career, don’t easily carry forward. A lot depends on the industry but virtually everything has been transformed by the Internet and computers. Even the computers of yesteryear are nothing like what we have now. The skills for building, repairing and using these technologies have changed dramatically. Longevity these days requires a constant state of learning to keep up. That gets harder as you grow older. My old teletype repair skills don’t serve me much anymore.

In the late ‘80s corporations became aware of unfounded liabilities, like unused vacation time, pensions, and agreements on long term health care after retirement.

The take over and restructuring craze of the late ‘80s showed that If someone took over and laid off everyone, they could clean up the balance sheet and resell the company. It was like flipping houses, except the house didn’t have to stand version long after the sale.

That’s when all the HR departments started saying,” you have to be more entrepreneurial.”