[aomurphy]

The situation for salarymen of the same year in big corps. at Japan is kind of similar. Wages are only from tenure, so two people who have been at the a corp. for 10 years have the same salary, even if one's a total duffer and the other is super important for the company. The reasons for this are historical, but don't really matter to this discussion. Almost everyone at these big co.s are hired right out of college in yearly "classes" and then stay their until retirement (ideally, obviously things are more complicated). The system isn't as strong today, so I'm describing something that existed more in the '80s.

What end's up happening is people in the same year are sorted by many other things. Better more interesting tasks are given to higher status workers, they avoid more grunt work, get nice perks (at top levels, things like a company car, etc.), and more respect.

It's hard to separate the effects of this on the company from all the other things Japanese companies do which are different from USA/Europe. But you might look into that.