A young woman in her 20s works 18 to 20 hours a day, including weekends, until she suffers a mental breakdown. A man in his 50s toils similar hours, averaging only three hours of sleep a night, until he collapses from a brain hemorrhage. Such are stories of corporate work culture in Japan, where employees are expected to log in an incredible number of overtime hours—often without pay. There’s even a legally recognized term for death-by-overwork: karoshi. The number of compensation claims filed by families of karoshi victimsreached an all-time high last year.
Last week, Tokyo’s governor (roughly the equivalent of an American mayor and state governor combined in terms of duties), Yuriko Koike, announced a plan to decrease overtime hours for the city’s 170,000 municipal workers, ordering them to leave the office by 8 p.m. at the latest. “Overtime prevention teams” will perform “overtime reduction marathons” in each department—they’ll turn out the lights to signal that it’s time to call it a day. Koike says she hopes that this system will become a model for other Japanese cities and for the private sector.
[For more of this story, written by Mimi Kirk, go to http://www.citylab.com/work/20...-on-overwork/500567/]
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