2y ago

207 Hours Overtime: Japanese Man in Kobe Worked to Death

207 Hours Overtime: Japanese Man in Kobe Worked to Death - Unseen Japan

A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan's continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.

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2y ago

207 Hours Overtime: Japanese Man in Kobe Worked to Death

unseen-japan.com /karoshi-death-overwork-kobe/

24 comments

Americans are like, shit what a rookie, I work 250 hours. This makes me a winner!
- I did 135 hour week once as a journalism intern. got fired because I didn't do 140 (would walk to hotel, sleep 4 hours, wake up, walk back to field office - "wow," you think, "what war was he covering?" and the answer is the war of an arts festival in northern england).
  didn't go back to journalism after that.
  
  Why did you work that much?
  
  What job was that, if I may ask?
- I remember more than once someone on Reddit bragging about how they worked 90 hours a week. I'm like, dude, I wish I worked 10 hours a week.
  
  Me too.
- I've done it once when I worked for a consulting company, it was hell. The paycheck at the end of it almost made up for it though.
Holy shit, that's roughly 7 hours across 30 days, that's insane if they were already working 8 hour shifts every normal work day.
- Holy shit. 15-18 hour shifts aren't uncommon at all where I'm from. No wonder we placed well below Japan on work-life balance statistics.
  The fact that there are places where people legitimately only work 8 hours a day is kind of mind blowing, thinking about it.
  
  Where do you live if you don't mind saying? That blows my mind the other way.
  
  Don't worry, that's being actively eroded. People cost too much to hire, at least according to the businesses, so they're just gonna find ways to make less people work more and more.
  
  Woof. Time for revolution.
  
  Where are you from?
Karoushi, 過労死, the wet dream of CEOs everywhere.
On top of how many? Still though, that's insane. But with such an aged population it's no wonder. Japan is in a vicious cycle and many other countries are getting there.
- Yep. Japans declining birth rates and aging are working against it. They're trying to keep up with current output with a smaller population. China will be facing something much worse because it struggles to attract immigration to offset population decline and will likely follow the same steps - increase hours to maintain output.
  
  Most of the developed world has this problem, in fact. The only places where it is less evident are those where they receive enough immigration from developing countries.
  Once the "developing world" eventually joins the "developed world" and begins to suffer the same declining birth issue, we are going to have to rethink our model of economics to accommodate for a shrinking global population of workers. The good news is that AI and automation might solve that problem for us, but we will have to see who can actually integrate these solutions responsibly, without consolidating all of the financial resources towards wealthy oligarchs who own the technology.
Not just Japan. China has a similar problem but the difference is they'd sooner censor people than allow them to coin a term for 'death by overworking.'
The term "996" coined in China refers to the idea of working 12-hour shifts from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
I haven't been able to find much information (in English,anyway) on the labor movement in Japan. The pervasiveness of unpaid overtime and stagnant wages leads me to wonder if it's moribund?

24 comments