On Christmas Day 2015, Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old woman, threw herself out the window of her home and had started working for Dentsu, the global advertising giant, in April of the same year. Another victim of Karoshi. ” Death from overwork,” recognized as an accident at work by the Japanese authorities since 1989.
On his Twitter account, Matsuri admitted that he only slept two hours a day and had 20 hours of work. He also wrote, “Are my eyes tired and my heart is dead?And “I think he’d be happier if he killed me. “
- Although these dramatic cases seem distant and typical of other countries.
- Karoshi is only a crude reflection of the scope of the capitalist mentality.
- Which mixes meritocracy with the most arduous competition because it is (or seems) more worthy of occupying a place in it.
- World.
On average, a Japanese employee works 2,070 hours a year. Overwork is the cause of death for about 200 people a year, from heart attack, stroke or suicide. In addition, there are many serious health problems related to restless work.
This way of coping with work is one of the legacies of the golden age of the Japanese economy of the 1980s. Hideo Hasegawa, a university professor and former Toshiba executive, perfectly expresses this idea of work: “When you’re in charge of a project, you have to complete it, whatever the conditions. It doesn’t matter how many hours you have to work. Otherwise, won’t you be a professional?
In the 1980s, Japanese advertising promoted employee altruism with a slogan: “Are you ready to fight 24 hours a day?”
The reputation for good work that haunted the Japanese-obsessed is not a myth. Many employees feel guilty about leaving the company for a vacation, for fear of being seen as “those who rest while others work for them. “
There are cases of employees who don’t want to go home too early for fear of what their neighbors and family members will say about their supposed lack of seriousness, and many try to go out for a drink with colleagues to promote business culture.
But this hard work is not very profitable. In fact, external observers often describe their productivity as low, who believe this partly explains the competitiveness deficiencies of local businesses.
In the long run, this way of working is not only non-competitive in terms of market, but also poses a risk to the health of the population, which can lead to the collapse of medical resources. already emerge as the main challenges in a society obsessed with the accumulation of working hours.
The problem is that exhaustion remains a ‘diffuse concept’ that, at the moment, does not appear in any of the main international classifications of mental disorders, so people can be hospitalized with symptoms associated with exhaustion: extreme fatigue, emotional exhaustion or depersonalization. insensitivity to others, without the symptoms being identified as karoshi.
There is no clear diagnosis of these symptoms, no certain parameters as to whether we have reached the limit of what we can work without compromising health, this lack of awareness in mental health, increasingly abusive work practices and a market for work transformed by technology make people go beyond all the limits of commitment to work.
The fear of unemployment and staying out of the system makes it seem that working at all times is a good option, when in reality intellectual capacities are diminishing and the health consequences can be irreversible, with an increased risk of falling into dependence of all kinds. .
Therefore, Karoshi would resemble a “chronic stress” that cannot be resisted; patients do not have the ability to endure it and fall into depression. However, the term burnout is much more socially accepted in Japan than depression, because extreme exhaustion is considered almost a “title of glory,” while depression is clearly less “glorious. “: perceived as a form of weakness.
This phenomenon is not limited only to the Japanese. Americans also gave it a name: “work addiction. “This dependence on work also exists in Europe. In Spain, more than 12% of the population suffers from this disease and 8% of them work more than 12 hours a day. In Switzerland, one in seven active people admit to being diagnosed with depression.
To combat the phenomenon you have to change your mindset, to begin with, Japanese entrepreneurs will have to abandon the misconception that long working hours are fundamental, learn from European countries like Germany, France or Sweden and move on to an economic model that favors shorter hours.
The Japanese government is already acting through legal reforms and more meticulous administrative control, properly using state authority to end long journeys. The state passed a reform that allows companies to stop paying overtime to workers earning more than 350,000 reais a year, most likely to suffer from exhaustion.
In addition, the State wants to impose a minimum of 5 days of leave on Japanese workers to combat overwork, which is detrimental to employee health and business productivity. holidays per year if they are at least six and a half years old; however, employees use less than half of this vacation.
The new law does not apply to part-time employees, but only to those entitled to at least 10 days of paid annual leave, in fact, it would apply when fatigue health attacks are real, either because of an accident at work or the danger of death.
Finally, citizens must also engage in the transformation of workplaces, making their voices heard between employers and the government, demanding working conditions that relieve them of pressure.
As citizens, it is also necessary to reflect and assess whether, with our excessive demand for services, we are not promoting the tightening of working conditions for workers.