From Japan to Europe, secure employment is harder to find.


Workers are under siege as the global economy suffers, and the crisis is breaking down the social contract in places usually immune to such stress.

The breakdown has, perhaps, been most dumbfounding in Japan, where Martin Fackler reports that the long-standing guarantee of lifetime employment has been severely revised.

A worker laid off from a Canon camera factory in Oita said he no longer recognized his country. “We did our best, so Canon should have taken care of us,” he told Mr. Fackler. “That is the Japanese way. But this isn’t Japan anymore.”

Toyota Motor reported its first annual net loss in 59 years, which meant Toyota City was enduring its worst slump in memory. “In the beginning, we used to aspire to be a second Detroit,” Tatsuya Yoshimura, who owns a camera shop there, told Mr. Fackler. “Now, that is what we are afraid of becoming.”

Wall Street lawyers share the new disorientation, as Alan Feuer reported in the Times recently. The traditional gentleman’s profession has become less fraternity and more fratricide as lawyers lose their jobs and the credit crisis destroys “traditional practice areas like structured finance, mergers and acquisitions and private-equity transactions.”

“It’s much more of a business now and less of a true partnership,” a top partner at White & Case, a distinguished old New York firm, told Mr. Feuer. “The problem is we’re supposed to all be in this together. But at some point, you stop and think: ‘Well, maybe we’re not.’”

The crisis has presented the European Union with the greatest test of the bloc’s purpose and unity, Steven Erlanger reports. Thierry Fagot, a worker in Amiens, France, expressed to Mr. Erlanger the growing national antagonisms shaking the union as a result of the crisis.

“Now, with the competition of Eastern countries, I feel like Europe created this situation where we’re losing our jobs to another E.U. country. How can this be for the greater good?” he said.

As these previously solid relationships break down, the question is what will take their place.

Many people initially thought blogging would provide financial security.

“Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that,’” Judy Williams told Douglas Quenqua in a recent article. But according to a 2008 survey by Technocrati, which runs a search engine for blogs, 95 percent of blogs are abandoned.

And illustrators around the world hope that Google’s vision of the social contract will never take hold. It would like illustrators for its new Web browser to work for free, according to an article by Andrew Adam Newman.

Google promised publicity in exchange, but some illustrators regard this as little more than Internet vampirism. Brian Stauffer, a Miami illustrator, told Mr. Newman: “When a company like Google comes out very publicly and expects that the market would just give them free artwork, it sets a very dangerous precedent.”