This month the first ever Japanese government report into the scale of karoshi, or death by overwork, found that employees put in over 80 hours of overtime a month at almost a quarter of companies surveyed. At 12% of those firms, the figure rose to a whopping 100 hours. These numbers may underestimate the problem; under a fifth of 10,000 companies contacted responded, which is a normal response rate, but firms with still worse overtime figures may have kept out of the study.
Little wonder that 93 people committed or attempted to commit suicide in the year to the end of March 2015 because of overwork. However, activists against karoshi reckon the number is too low. Other workers perish from heart attacks or strokes due to long hours.
Things are currently somewhat better; more overtime is paid, for example. Yet, further steps are needed. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, says that changing the working style in Japan is one of the main aims of labor reforms that he plans to introduce next year. Yuriko Koike, the new governor of Tokyo, wants to improve the city’s work-life balance and has banned workers in her office from staying past 8pm.
However, it remains hard to overhaul business practices when the culture values face time and dedication to the job far ahead of performance. “The company is like a big team. If I leave work early, someone else has to shoulder my work and that makes me feel terribly guilty,” says a 42-year-old IT worker who preferred to remain anonymous.
It does not help that the shrinking and aging of Japan’s population means labor shortages. And all this overwork does little for the economy, because (thanks to the inefficient working culture as well as low use of technology) Japan is one of the least productive economies in the OECD, a club of rich nations, generating only $39 dollars of GDP per hour worked compared with America’s $62.
So the fact that workers are burning out and sometimes dying is pointless as well as tragic.
edited from The Economist
