Japans employees are literally working themselves to death

[inanna]

January 14 at 3:31 PM

The Japanese might be the hardest working people in the world. Employees there sleep less and work longer hours than almost anywhere else. The culture is so rigorous that there's a word for literally working yourself to death: karoshi.

That might be good if you're an employer trying to make a deadline or cut costs. But it's bad if you're a country with a falling birthrate and a population of people who say they're too busy and exhausted to have children.

So officials are launching a new campaign to get employees out of the office. Dubbed “Premium Friday,” it will encourage companies to let workers leave early on the last Friday of the month. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is also pushing a measure to cap overtime, which he says he'll enforce with random inspections. These come on the heels of major investigations into Mitsubishi and Dentsu, both accused of forcing excessive work. At Dentsu, a 24-year-old woman killed herself after putting in 100 hours of overtime.

A government spokesman told Bloomberg News that Japan needs to “end of the norm of long working hours so people can balance their lives with things like raising a child or taking care of the elderly.”

...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/14/japans-employees-are-literally-working-themselves-to-death/

[Warpy]

1. They're not only too busy and exhausted to have children, they're too hopeless

to even consider marriage--that rate is falling fast, also.

Even letting them go early on Saturday is no solution since most will be forced to "party" with managers instead of going home for rest.

When bosses take over, labor will find any way it can to opt out, either by suicide or by preventing another generation to be created to live under the same brutal circumstances.

[Nitram]

2. Pretty old news.

This has been a thing since the 1990s.