







●Introduction

Japanese government implemented work-style reform in April 2019 to curb Japan’s notoriously long work hours and to prevent Karoshi. The prevention scheme is called “Hataraki-kata kaikaku” which is translated as “work-style reform”. However, that work-style reform seems not to change Japanese work style drastically.

Work-style reform

As of April 2019, the following provisions came into effect.

1. Maximum overtime working hours

Overtime has to be less than 100 hours per month, and the average overtime work hour for 2 to 6 months must be less than 80 hours per month, and also the yearly maximum overtime is 720 hours.

2. Mandatory paid holiday

The company must provide 5 paid holidays to the workers who are eligible for more than 10 paid holidays a year. The workers have to take at least 5 paid holidays a year if they hold the right of more than 10 paid holidays a year.

3. Interval regulations

The company has to make efforts to give workers a minimum amount of rest between working days.

4. Discretionary labor system for high-income professionals

The system allows employers to pay workers according to a predetermined number of hours instead of actual working hours. Therefore, workers would not be paid for overtime work that hasn’t been agreed upon beforehand.

Workers who earn more than 10.75 million yen a year (roughly about US$100,000 a year) or workers who have specific specialties such as lawyers, accountants and architects are subject to the discretionary labor system.

The employer needs to obtain consent from each individual worker on this discretionary labor system.

What I heard from my Japanese friends

Can you believe that the restriction on the maximum overtime is 100 hours per month in the first provision of work-style reform?

If you work 20 days a month, 100 hours a month means 5 HOURS A DAY. It’s 5 hours a day of overtime, that’s crazy long ! I cannot believe less than 100 hours a month can be a regulation in Japan. I bet many people work on the weekends, so that the daily overtime hours may be less than 5 hours. But, still 100 hours per month are very long overtime hours.

I and my wife have been working in the US for a long time, but we have rarely seen American employees who work 5 hours of overtime a day.

After this reform was implemented in April, I heard from my Japanese friends that he had to work 24 hours a day for several weeks. Also, some Japanese friends told me that the employees in government jobs or IT industry work very late at night such as 2am in Japan.

The relation between working hours and happiness

There seems a negative correlation between working hours and happiness. Please see the figure below. The more hours people work, the less happy people feel.

I used the statistics of “Average annual hours actually worked per worker” from OECD stat for 2015 to 2017 and “Happiness Score” from World Happiness Report 2018 to make the figure above. The “Happiness Score” was obtained from 2015 to 2017 so that I averaged the “Average annual hours actually worked per worker” from 2015 to 2017. The slope coefficient, －0.0016, is statistically significant at 1 percent level. If you want to have a happy life, don’t work too long !

Japan is in the center of graph at around 1,720 working hours on the horizontal axis and 5.9 on the vertical axis. Some people might think that the Japanese working hours are not that long, but this is because of the high percentage of part-time workers in total employment in Japan. Japan is ranked at 5th in the OECD nations in 2017 at 22% for the part-time employment rate according to OECD stat data. Part-time employees worked 1,033 hours in Japan in 2017 while full-time workers worked 2,026 hours according to Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan. There is a huge gap in working hours between part-time and full-time in Japan, which made the average working hours lower to the levels between 1,700 to 1,800 hours.

Also, the statistics of working hours in Japan does not reflect the truth in my opinion. A lot of Japanese workers report their working hours to their employers less than the actual, trying to avoid being blamed by their bosses for working too long.

Summary

This reform is the first regulation that Japanese government has put on employees overtime work with a penalty since Labor Standards Act was established in 1947 in Japan. In my opinion, the new provisions are just the first steps to improve work environments for workers in Japan. The new provision still allows people in Japan to work up to maximum 100 hour of overtime. Japanese people would have happier lives if they could reduce their working hours. There is still a long way to go to make the working conditions better for workers in Japan.

If you are interested in learning more about karoshi, long working hours, and power harassment in Japan, please read the following articles below.







Reference

・OECD Stat, < http://www.oecd.org/ >, Retrieved on April 9th 2019.

・Helliwell, John; Layard, Richard; Sachs, Jeffrey (2018). World Happiness Report 2018. Retrieved from <https://worldhappiness.report/> on April 9th 2019.

・jiji.com, <https://www.jiji.com/jc/article?k=2019032500774&g=soc>, Retrieved on April 9th 2019.

・Hiroshi Ono (2018). Why Do the Japanese Work Long Hours? Sociological Perspectives on Long Working Hours in Japan, Japan Labor Issues, vol.2, no.5.