A Dying Breed
Karoshi — death by overwork, is a major problem faced by Japanese employers and employees alike. By some reckonings, up to 10,000 Japanese die from it annually — grim testimony to the fierce dedication among workers which has helped propel Japan to a position of supremacy in key global industries.
Japan has, in fact, been reducing average working hours for some time. The number fell marginally to 2,052 hours in 1990 from 2,111 in 1987. The latest figures, however, arc still , 100-200 hours a year more than those worked in the West. More importantly, these official j tallies exclude unrecorded overtime, work taken home, and commitments such as entertaining clients on golf courses at weekends.
Thus, the national target of cutting average annual work hours to 1,800 by 1995 seems a tall order. It will require Japanese to take more holidays, as well as cut their working week. Legislation to cut standard weekly hours to 40 from 44 is expected to come into force next January, along with requirements that overtime pay exceed the current minimum of 125% of regular pay.
More to the point, will Japanese workers take their extra time off? Most employees currently use only seven to nine days out of annual leave allocations of two to four weeks. Their actual leave is, therefore, roughly half that taken by US workers and about a third of that taken by the Germans and the French. (Japan also has 13 annual pubic holidays, and some companies do offer extra days off.)
In a recent survey conducted by a Tokyo-based think-tank, 40% of those interviewed said they were “uncomfortable with taking paid holidays”, while another 41% said they would be “at a loss if given vacations lasting a month.” One common explanation for these sorts of results is that Japanese love to work. “We were taught as a child that diligence is the finest virtue,” says a 38-year-old journalist.
This traditional attitude is strongest among the post-World War II generation which single-mindedly pursued economic development. Many of the people now at the top of Japan’s big corporations, as well as in senior positions in government, are from this generation. And if these senior executives do not take holidays, few junior staff dare to do so in a society which values group action. As a result, millions of Japanese annually compete for leisure facilities during the national Golden Week and New Year breaks, when everyone stops work at the same time. “We feel secure when everybody is doing the same thing,” says the journalist
The view that the employee should devote almost all his or her waking hours to the work unit is further promoted by the traditional system of near-lifetime employment. Many of today’s graduates and white-collar workers, however, would prefer to leave the old system behind in favour of finite labour contracts with their companies.
Japan also needs to change retirement rules that virtually force employees to remain at work until their 60“ birthdays if they are to qualify for the lump-sum payments — typically ¥20-30 million — that supplement pensions. One advocate of such a move is Hitotsubashi University Professor Iwao Nakatani. He acknowledges, though, that this might require major changes in Japan’s state pension and social security systems to compensate for reducing company provisions.
Some big companies have begun making changes to work regimes. Sanyo and Matsushita, for example, plan to reduce the number of working hours to 1,800 by March 1994, while Sharp hopes to achieve the same goal by the late 1990s. Canon has even given its staff 16 consecutive days of vacation this summer. These cases, however, are the exception.
Moreover, a key caveat in the push towards more-relaxed work routines — as with other broader issues in the workload debate — is that changes agreed to by big companies may prove beyond the reach of small and medium-sized firms. By international standards, these smaller enterprises comprise an unusually large share of Japan’s economy and represent a considerable obstacle to change.
Currently, they are grappling with a chronic labour shortage at a time when the costs of labour-saving capital investment are rising. And times will get tougher as the economy slows and big companies squeeze their suppliers harder. “We are not talking about working less, but about how to maintain the same volume of work as last year,” says a spokesman for an Osaka-based small-business association.
Nonetheless, the new economic pressures now being felt by Japan are likely to produce changes whatever the outcome of the workload debate.
The collapse of the Tokyo stock-market and with it the era of warrant and convertible-bond issues has raised the cost of this once-popular form of financing from around 1% to nearer 5%-6%. Debt-servicing costs have also risen with higher interest rates. Companies have been cut off from cheap credit and manufacturing investment has slumped. The result is likely to slow down productivity gains.
Profits have, meanwhile, declined sharply on the back of reduced domestic and overseas demand, and of higher depreciation costs associated with earlier capital investment. The corporate sector is under pressure, too, from institutional investors and the Ministry of Finance to increase dividend pay-out ratios.
Japanese enterprises have dedicated employees whose workaholic tradition has helped . Japan's economy and made the country into an superpower. It is believed that there are cultural, historical and economic reasons behind the tradition. For example, the payments for employees who retire at the age of 60 is a comfortable addition to the state .
Recently, there has been pressure — both from domestic and overseas — for that tradition to change. As a result, are reducing the number of work hours. A lot of small and companies, however, may not afford to do so, as they are finding it difficult to their business. What has happened to Japanese economy recently, for example, the collapse of the , the shrinking of domestic and overseas are likely to influence the change in employees’ . It will be interesting to see how things develop.