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Forum - View topicINTEREST: Government Investigation Finds 37% of Businesses in Japan Are Guilty of Illegal Overtime W
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Top Gun
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Insert Futurama shocked GIF here.
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Duck Du Normandie
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720 hours per year? 40 hours a week for 50 weeks is 2000 hours. I think there's a typo somewhere in there. |
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Heart of the Foreign God
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bones2039
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I wonder if the 720 is the cap on the amount of OT hours per year, not regular working hours. If that is a yearly OT, it would work out to 13.85 OT hours a week on average. So a worker could work 100 OT hours in a month, but you can't do that for more than 7 months in one year. That is the only thing I can think of unless how Japan refers to what is regular hours and OT hours is different than what most americans would think. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2568 |
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Was thinking the same. From other articles, I think that's correct, e.g., The government is toughening the rules in order to change the status quo in a country where working overtime is the norm. Under the proposed legislation, a special arrangement under Article 36 would allow up to 720 hours of overtime for an average of 60 hours a month. Corporations that exceed the threshold would face legal penalties. https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan-unveils-overtime-cap-to-curb-long-work-hours |
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Kabuby 77
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100 hours of overwork per mounth are insane! If you have 24 working days it means +4 hours, if you work 20 days it's +5. It is legalized slavery. With all these hours you can afford to hire more people
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Duck Du Normandie
Subscriber Posts: 44 |
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That makes a lot more sense. :) |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 675 |
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First, that would be a cap, not a minimum, or a requirement. The issue lies not in what the maximum is, but the rules and circumstances surrounding this that would push a person to need to be there that much. That is where enforcement of the rules becomes important, since, as the article suggests, there are companies skirting the rules to force people into all these extra hours. Second, most businesses that do this likely either cannot afford to, or cannot find, additional people to work. In every OT situation I've ever seen, it has been born of these two situations. Hiring more people isn't just about a paycheck. There are whatever the minimum benefits required by law are, any benefits the company itself offers, cost of training, insurance and liability coverage. Yeah, at a certain point more people would outweigh the cost of paying OT, but it's not as simple as X hours = new hire. It's easier to just ask someone who's already there and knows the ropes than to try out somebody new who might stick around for a couple weeks and split. I imagine that in a good number of cases you have people not getting paid for their OT work either - which again comes back to education and enforcement of the laws. I once sat in on an arbitration case where a former cashier accused their boss of not paying overtime. The cashier alleged they were being denied almost 10 hours of OT a week for a month. Turned out they thought they were supposed to get paid for the hours they were scheduled, not the hours they actually worked. They were switching days with someone else so they could work shorter shifts on certain days, then coming in on a "6th" day. So some days they would work 6 hours or 5 hours, instead of 8, and thought they were supposed to get paid for 8. There was another case where I had someone who didn't even know that they were entitled, under their employment contract, to collect OT on anything over their "scheduled" hours, not just 8 hours, so they had no idea for months they were missing out on a bunch of OT pay. I had another case where an employee didn't know that they didn't have to agree to work OT if they didn't want to. This is all in the US, mind you. I can only imagine that in Japan where the work culture is different, they likely have similar issues of lack of information/knowledge out there to the average worker.. |
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xxmsxx
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Am I surprised? No.
Do I think any of these findings will lead to better conditions? No.
Yes, of course, a guidance is going to fix this....... Interestingly, it is about illegal OT.....I wonder how much legal OT most people do already...... Maybe this is too much for some people, but 40 hours of OT for a month is already waaaaay too much for most positions on this planet. |
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Sinsekihokimchiansu
 Posts: 159 |
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Japanese are dedicated workers but it's a sad reality that all those overtime is exhausting the soul and mind and what's even more sadder the government are aware of it and have been trying to solve this problems and so far it hasn't been effective
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16969 |
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I'm honestly more surprised that according to the investigation only 37% of businesses in Japan are guilty of this. I would've figured the number would be closer to 45-50% honestly.
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Frog-kun
ANN Reviewer
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Corrected, thanks! |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2568 |
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37% is probably a generous lower bound? I can't imagine the investigation managed to catch every business doing this, so it probably had a bunch of false negatives, but it is harder to imagine it generating very many false positives. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar Posts: 16969 |
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That is pretty much what I was thinking, given that 37% seemed to low to me. Either way it's a sad state of affairs for workers. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 14216 |
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Not surprising, but still pretty bad.
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