Karōshi
Karōshi is a Japanese term that translates to "death from overwork," highlighting a serious issue within Japan's work culture. This phenomenon arises from employees routinely working excessive hours, often exceeding one hundred hours of overtime per month, leading to severe health consequences, including heart attacks, strokes, and, tragically, suicides. The roots of karōshi can be traced back to post-World War II policies that encouraged lifetime employment in exchange for loyalty, creating an intense work ethic that persists today. Although karōshi affects individuals across various ages and job types, many workers feel pressured to forgo vacation time and accept long hours due to societal expectations and employer demands.
Despite attempts to address the issue, such as initiatives to promote better work-life balance, progress has been slow, and many employees remain skeptical about the effectiveness of these measures. The concept of karōshi has garnered international attention, with research indicating that it is not unique to Japan, as similar trends have emerged in other countries. Studies, including one from the World Health Organization, have revealed alarming statistics about the global impact of long working hours, reinforcing the urgent need for cultural and structural changes in workplace practices worldwide.
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Karōshi
Karōshi is the term used in Japan for employees who literally work themselves to death. The work culture in Japan encourages, and often demands, that employees work up to or more than one hundred hours of overtime a month. This results in deaths from heart attacks, strokes and related health conditions, and suicides. Karōshi affects employees of all ages and types of jobs. Political, financial, cultural, and social pressures have all combined to make the problem very difficult to solve.
Background
The conditions that led to karōshi began in the days following World War II (1939–1945). The destruction of two major cities by atomic bombs, the deaths of thousands of citizens, the loss of many young men to the fighting, and the cost of restoring war damage were among many factors that caused significant financial hardship in Japan. In the following decade, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida wanted to rebuild the economy. To encourage this, he asked the country’s largest companies to guarantee their employees jobs for life if they would remain loyal to the company. The companies complied, and the economy soon showed great improvement.
By the end of the 1960s, however, the country began experiencing a new problem. In 1969, a twenty-nine-year-old man who worked many hours of overtime in the shipping department of a large newspaper died from a stroke. The man’s death was attributed to occupational sudden death, the original name for death by overworking. His death is considered the first official case of karōshi.
During the 1970s, about one hundred deaths in Japan were said to be caused by occupational sudden death. Surviving family members received government compensation for the loss of their loved ones. Studies began to show how the practice of shift work, in which a company operates around the clock with a succession of shifts of employees, increased the likelihood of karōshi.
Throughout the 1980s and subsequent decades, the problem continued to increase in prevalence. Other countries began to pay attention to Japanese workers in their countries, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee began an investigation. However, the problem continued and once again came to international prominence after the deaths of two young women in the news industry. A thirty-one-year-old woman died of a heart attack in 2013 after working nearly 160 hours of overtime in one month, and another woman jumped to her death on Christmas Eve in 2015 at the age of twenty-four after work pressures became too great. Information about these deaths was released in 2017 and was covered by media outlets around the world.
Overview
In many industrialized countries, the average workweek is about thirty-six to forty hours. This means most employees work about 160 hours in a four-week month. In Japan, however, it is common for people to work many, many hours of overtime. This work is often unpaid but is expected or even forced by employers, who may also falsify government records to hide the practice.
Studies have determined that working eighty hours of overtime in one month increases an employee’s chance of death. Japanese studies have indicated that about 20 percent of the country’s workers log at least eighty hours of overtime weekly. More than 10 percent have reported working one hundred or more hours, which significantly increases the possibility of death in workers of all ages and causes additional health concerns. In addition, between one-third and one-half of the workers have indicated they do not take vacation time.
There are several factors contributing to this level of excess work. One is the societal expectation for people to work long hours to advance to higher levels of employment. Younger workers are expected to work very long hours to earn the right to advance, and total commitment to the job is often seen as the only way to move up to management positions. Older workers feel they need to work long hours so younger workers do not replace them.
Another cause is the expectation of employers, who may demand that employees work overtime or that they accomplish an amount of work that cannot be completed without working overtime. These factors are complicated by outside factors, including the following:
- Societal pressure to work hard so one is not seen as lazy.
- Financial pressures on companies to increase profits and expand.
- Lack of job security.
- Political pressure from companies on government officials to prevent the passage of legislation that would limit the ability of employers to require overtime.
Employers and officials in Japan have been under increasing pressure from workers and the families of the victims of karōshi to do something to improve working conditions. A number of things have been tried. For example, in 2016, the government introduced Premium Fridays, in which employees were encouraged to go home at 3:00 p.m. on the last Friday of each month. However, the effort was not well received because many companies usually push to finish end-of-the-month work or quotas, so employees were either discouraged from leaving or found themselves under even more intense pressure to do more work in less time. Additionally, the concept of "public gaze," or seken, is engrained in Japanese culture. One's public image is a significant concern for individuals and their families. Laws restricting the number of hours employees could work have been intensely opposed by companies interested in maintaining profits.
Other solutions have been proposed, including increasing the penalties for companies caught forcing employees to work long hours and passing laws prohibiting employers from requiring employees to work more than sixty hours a month in overtime, except in specific circumstances. Some suggested fostering a cultural shift emphasizing efficiency over time expended at work. However, Japanese citizens had little faith that these efforts would succeed. Companies continued to demonstrate their willingness to skirt labor laws to have employees work overtime to improve their chances of financial success. Employees themselves often found the long hours necessary, bowing to long-standing societal and cultural pressures to work hard. The feeling that long work hours are necessary is so intensely ingrained in the culture that employers in one town resorted to shutting off the lights in the building to force employees to stop working and go home. In the face of such personal expectations by workers, many doubted anything could stop karōshi.
Decades after karōshi was recognized as a concept, karōshi’s prevalence remained in Japan, and research indicated the problem had spread to become a worldwide phenomenon. A landmark 2021 study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO) revealed that over 750,000 annual deaths are related to working long hours, work stress, poor work-life balance, and other job-related stresses that lead to chronic illness. Many countries adopted terms for this phenomenon, such as guolaosi in China and gwarosa in South Korea.
Bibliography
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