Japanese banned from working too much
Overtime work for Japanese employees must be limited to 45 hours per month and 360 hours per year. However, in case of an emergency, workers will be able to work no more than 100 overtime hours over six months, and no more than 720 hours per year. Companies that violate the rules will be fined.
As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, the issue of working day reform was one of the main ones that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised to address as part of his third government.
Over the past two decades, the number of working hours for permanent staff has consistently hovered around 2,000 hours per year. For non-permanent employees, this figure was 1,910 hours in 1994 and 1,734 hours in 2015. In Japan, a special word has even been coined to denote "death from overwork" – "karoshi".
The authorities began to pay particularly close attention to the problem after a female employee of the advertising agency Dentsu committed suicide in 2015. An investigation showed that the cause of the suicide was overwork. In one month, she worked 105 hours more than the norm.
The next high-profile case occurred in 2016, when a software development company employee committed suicide under similar circumstances. He was working on a project for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and spent 16 hours a day, seven days a week at work, working 70 hours overtime per month and having constant conflicts with management. On the day of his death, he listened to his boss's complaints for an hour and a half.
In summary, the statistics look like this: in 2017, 190 people in Japan died from overwork. This number includes suicides, heart attacks, and strokes. In 90% of cases, the deceased exceeded the monthly norm by 80 hours, and in 50% of them, by 100 hours or more.