Beat the fear of layoff by worksharing!!

                              The Idea of Work-sharing

This the new mantra in the organizations in some parts of Europe and Japan where they are not laying of employees due to recession, rather than there is salary cut and the work is shared between two or three people what was previously one person's job. The idea is that employees are required to share the pain of coping with hard times while everyone gets to keep their jobs even if they're paid less.

Worksharing is the latest buzzword in Japan Inc. Proponents say it's a good way to avoid American style layoffs in a society that has long fostered lifetime employment. Companies like Toyota Motor Corp, Mazda Motor Corp, Toshiba Corp. and Fujitsu, have all taken up some kind of worksharing.

Although critics say it's merely a fancy way to disguise wage cuts, the practice is winning powerful supporters in Japan.
The government is now considering earmarking public money for companies that take up worksharing to curb surging joblessness as the world's second largest economy slides into what authorities are calling Japan's worst recession since World War II.

A handful of Japanese companies experimented with worksharing during a slowdown a decade ago, but this time more are adopting the practice than ever before as a way to survive the far more serious recession. Worksharing is catching on here for cultural, legal and practical reasons.

Many Japanese companies maintain the tradition of lifetime employment so worksharing is a way to avoid firing regular workers. So far, most of the layoffs have involved contract workers, whose use became legal in recent years to skirt the regulations protecting full-time, salaried workers.

Labor laws tend to defend lifetime employment, usually requiring companies to provide hefty severance packages or risk facing lawsuits. If a company is in bankruptcy or losing money, it becomes easier legally to lay off workers. At the same time, worksharing allows companies to keep trained workers and bring them back up to full time quickly, once a recovery comes.

Worksharing is routine in nations such as Germany and Switzerland, where the government provides unemployment benefits to make up for the income fall from lost hours.

"The income loss is spread over more people, and fewer people suffer the depression associated with unemployment. The economic advantage is that firms retain their workers who are experienced on the job.

Worksharing is taking various forms in Japan, and some companies aren't even calling it that. At Tourism Essentials Tokyo, a job-referral company, two flight attendants sent to an airline were asked to share one job, and one person's pay, to avoid one of them getting fired. At Fujitsu's computer chip unit, the shifts at the 24-hour-running plants were increased from two shifts of 12 hours each to three 8-hour shifts so each worker had their hours and pay reduced by a third.

Worksharing is also finding acceptance in nearby South Korea.

So Can India and others also apply this worksharing approach??