Late in the evening, Japan’s black-suited salarymen let their hair down in the streets of Shimbashi, a district of Tokyo. Shirts untucked, ties off and liquor flowing, they stagger around before heading home—or directly back to the office via a konbini (convenience store) to buy a clean shirt.
This is the harmless outlet for their stress. Karoshi, or death by overwork, is the darker and, until recently, more overlooked one. This month the first-ever government report into the scale of karoshi found that employees put in more than 80 hours of overtime a month at almost a quarter of companies surveyed. At 12% of those companies, the figure rose to a whopping 100 hours.
These numbers may underestimate the problem: Less than a fifth of the 10,000 companies contacted responded, which is a normal response rate. Companies with still-worse overtime figures may have kept themselves out of the study for that reason.
Little wonder that 93 people committed or attempted to commit suicide because of overwork in the year to the end of March 2015. These are the cases in which the government has officially recognized that families are owed compensation, but activists against karoshi reckon that the number is too low. Other workers perish from heart attacks or strokes due to long hours. The latest high-profile case is a 24-year-old female employee of Dentsu, a Japanese advertising giant, who committed suicide in December.
Things have gotten somewhat better in recent years: More overtime is paid, for example. Further steps are needed, though. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said 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 8 p.m.
It remains hard to overhaul business practices, however, when the culture values face time and dedication to the job far ahead of performance.
“The company is like a big team,” said a 42-year-old IT worker who preferred to remain anonymous. “If I leave work early, someone else has to shoulder my work, and that makes me feel terribly guilty.”
It does not help that the shrinking and aging of Japan’s population means labor shortages. Furthermore, 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 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of rich nations, generating only $39 dollars of GDP per hour worked compared with America’s $62.
The fact that workers are burning out and sometimes dying is therefore pointless as well as tragic.
© 2016 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (October 15). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Image credits: Toru Yamanaka/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
1 comment
Make unity in all employees and report to the government or give the proper training to leaders in a company so that they can manage work on time.