Here’s one of those word-association questions: What do you immediately think of when you hear the term “job for life?”

If you’re like me, your mind probably jumps to this: the pope; the queen of England; Supreme Court justices; Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe; dictators in Asia and Africa; and tenured schoolteachers. I don’t know anyone who equates the notion of a lifetime job with journalists or newspaper professionals, but that quaint concept is at the heart of the ongoing struggle for the survival of The Boston Globe, New England’s leading newspaper.

“The Boston Globe dodged a corporate bullet [this week] as the New York Times Co. … backed off a threat to notify federal authorities that it plans to close the paper within 60 days,” according to Howard Kurtz writing in The Washington Post. The Globe managed to avoid a shutdown notice because the Times Co. reached an agreement with six of the Globe’s seven unions, including the Teamsters, over its demands for $20 million in concessions, “but not with the Boston Newspaper Guild, which has accused Times executives of ‘bullying’ tactics.”

So what’s the hang-up with the last union, you might ask? According to the Post story, “The sticking point remains lifetime job guarantees for 170 of the guild’s 660 journalists, advertising and business office employees, previously negotiated in return for other concessions.”

The fact that yet another newspaper is on the brink of closing down isn’t a shock, of course, given all that’s happening in the newspaper business all over America. The surprise here, at least to me, is that anyone would actually think that the concept of a “lifetime job” is sustainable in our 2009 economy, and, that a union like the Newspaper Guild would be foolish enough to put a lifetime job guarantee for 170 ahead of the survival of the business and jobs for everyone else in The Boston Globe’s workforce.

“The idea of lifetime jobs seems hopelessly quaint in this era of Darwinian globalization, continuous technological disruption and profound economic uncertainty,” says former newspaper editor and Reflections of a Newsosaur blogger Alan Mutter.

The notion of a lifetime job, he adds, “was born of arrogance on the part of [newspaper] publishers who thought their market supremacy would endure forever, and arrogance on the part of unions who once wielded sufficient power to intimidate management into agreeing to this perfectly preposterous proposition. Apart from federal judges and tinhorn dictators, no one has the luxury of a job for life. And no one should.”

Don’t get me wrong; I love the concept of a “job for life,” but I put that in the same category as buying a ticket in hopes of winning the lottery. It’s a wonderful fantasy, but totally removed from the reality of day-to-day life. And, a lifetime job is an “unsustainable” business proposition, notes media critic Dan Kennedy, especially “at a time when the newspaper business is getting much, much smaller.”

My grandfather used to tout the concept of lifetime jobs, and I heard it when he retired from his position as a printer for the New York Daily News back in the late 1960s. As much as I loved him, I questioned it as a kid then the same way I question it now as an adult so many years later.

Some will undoubtedly say that the problem with modern society is that jobs are just too disposable, and I agree that American business has been far too ready and willing to slash workers, sometimes with little or no good reason. But, organized labor can’t continue to act like it is immune from the economic realities that we all are dealing with today.

The notion of a “lifetime” job wasn’t sustainable in my grandfather’s day, and it isn’t sustainable now some 40 years later. It’s a relic of a time long past, and proof once more that organized labor too often is completely out of touch, and they would rather argue over out-of-date concepts than focus on the difficult economic realities of the 2009 workplace.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.