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Working style in Japan

2016-10-20 14:22:16

Overdoing it

A new report shows how badly Japan needs labour reform

Oct 15th 2016 | TOKYO

LATE of an evening, Japan s black-suited salarymen let their hair down in the

streets of Shimbashi, a district of Tokyo. Shirts untucked, ties off, 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 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. These are the cases where

the government has officially recognised that families are owed compensation;

activists against karoshi reckon 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 for Dentsu, a Japanese advertising giant, who

committed suicide in December.

Things have got somewhat better in recent years; more overtime is paid, for

example. But further steps are needed. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, says

that changing the working style in Japan is one of the main aims of labour

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.

But 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 ageing of Japan s

population means labour 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.