In a message dated 10/5/02 11:10:41 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< Private employers have occasionally tried something like tenure--it has been widely aspired to in Japan since WW2 (although only the larger employers have been able to apply it in practice) and IBM was for many years famous for the degree of employment security it offered--but the cost-pressures of a highly competitive marketplace have eroded these policies. >> At one time (1970s) the "Big Eight" public accounting firms offered something down the tenure side of the employment spectrum for new accountants. Not only did the firms never fire during "busy season," but they typically kept virtually all new professional staff for the two years that most states require for certification (getting the CPA license). Partners, who in reality are more akin to shareholders than traditional partners, virtually never got fired. Some firms, like the now-infamous Arthur Andersen, went even further. If at some point the partners decided that an accountant no longer merited the partner track, rather than firing the accountant outright they tried to place him or her with a client, keeping "Andersen alumni" in the "Arthur Andersen family." I worked in their Denver office more than a decade and a half ago, and I still get Arthur Andersen Alumni Bulletins mailed to my home. By the mid-1980s, however, the Big Eight (which became the Big Six and then the Big Five as they consolidated in the face of lawsuits and intense competition from "second tier" firms) began to fire more frequently and not try to place former employees at all. My office fired a tax professional right in the middle of busy season, and then me right after busy season, after merely 9 months with them. They fired me in part, ironically, because one of the partners there had engaged me in a great deal of non-billable recruiting from the university as which I'd gotten my masters degree in taxation, a masters program which had a poor view of Andersen even then and had even tried to persuade me not to work there. After Andersen fired me I'd planned to go chew out the partner who'd had me do all the nonbillable recruitment, only to discover that he'd been fired early that day--after uprooting his whole family and moving it across the country to do exaclty what the firm had him doing. So much for tenure at Arthur Andersen. David Levenstam
