The Grand Narrative

(”overworked mind needs rest” by sanguine seeker)

My plans for the blog still have a week to wait before I’m back with my books in Korea, but in the meantime the reception desk seems to have accidentally granted me 2 free days of internet usage, which I’m not going to draw their attention to anytime soon. I’ve been taking advantage by catching up with all my Economist magazines, otherwise physically waiting for me on my neighbour’s coffee table in Busan.

This article on death by overwork in Japan caught my eye, interesting because I need a post up otherwise I’ll start losing readers it shows the extremes of the long hours and overall company-first culture of Japanese workplaces, which will need to change drastically in order to encourage mothers to remain in the workforce (the alternative being - god forbid - immigrants). Naturally, with Korea being overshadowed by Western interest in Japan then I don’t expect a similar article about Korea in English anytime soon, but as Korean workplaces are so similar then the article is still relevant, and indeed even the Wikipedia article on Karōshi/ 過労死, the Japanese term for it, seems fit to mention that the phenomenon is called Gwarosa/과로사 in Korean. Does anyone know if there a Taiwanese equivalent?

(”Overworked and out of toner…” by G*Squared)

The article is short enough that I may as well as well give the entire thing. Afterwards, if you’re interested in reading more about the history of the phenomenon in Japan, then I highly recommend this short but comprehensive academic journal article from 1997 available here.

Jobs For Life

Dec 19th 2007

Japanese employees are working themselves to death

HARA-KIRI is a uniquely Japanese form of suicide. Its corporate equivalent is karoshi, “death by overwork”. Since this was legally recognised as a cause of death in the 1980s, the number of cases submitted to the government for the designation has soared; so has the number of court cases that result when the government refuses an application. In 1988 only about 4% of applications were successful. By 2005 that share had risen to 40%. If a death is judged karoshi, surviving family members may receive compensation of around $20,000 a year from the government and sometimes up to $1m from the company in damages. For deaths not designated karoshi the family gets next to nothing.

Now a recent court ruling has put companies under pressure to change their ways. On November 30th the Nagoya District Court accepted Hiroko Uchino’s claim that her husband, Kenichi, a third-generation Toyota employee, was a victim of karoshi when he died in 2002 at the age of 30. He collapsed at 4am at work, having put in more than 80 hours of overtime each month for six months before his death. “The moment when I am happiest is when I can sleep,” Mr Uchino told his wife the week of his death. He left two children, aged one and three.

As a manager of quality control, Mr Uchino was constantly training workers, attending meetings and writing reports when not on the production line. Toyota treated almost all that time as voluntary and unpaid. So did the Toyota Labour Standards Inspection Office, part of the labour ministry. But the court ruled that the long hours were an integral part of his job. On December 14th the government decided not to appeal against the verdict.

(”The worker salutes progress and capitalism” by drpritch)

With the exception of the quotation of Uchino’s widow in the final paragraph below, I don’t think the Economist makes any statement about Toyota’s possible mistreatment of its workers here. But I do remember that the end of this November article A Wobble on the Road to the Top mentioned that its much vaunted environmentalism was open to the criticism that it was all just for show (see the truthabouttoyota website for more information), and if that turns out to be true then I’m certainly much more open to the idea. I can’t find any links worry, but I remember that in Korea, sometime last year a worker at either LG or Samsung resigned and sent a letter to all employees, complaining of the long, unpaid hours and the mundane reality of working as a salaryman, and I do know that Samsung doesn’t allow unionization. While looking for links, I also found the article New Tech, Old Habits that describes how, despite the technological sophistication of their products, many Japanese and Korean companies will not allow workers to do things like take laptops out of the office, or allow them full access to work files from home, thereby forcing them to stay past midnight and so on, often for mundane tasks that could be just as easily be done at home.

That article is so good, I think I’ll write about it in my next post. In the meantime, can anyone help with information about the very public resignation of that worker in Korea, or can any Japan-based or Japan-savvy readers tell me what Toyota’s reputation is like really?

The ruling is important because it may increase the pressure on companies to treat “free overtime” (work that an employee is obliged to perform but not paid for) as paid work. That would send shockwaves through corporate Japan, where long, long hours are the norm.

Official figures say that the Japanese work about 1,780 hours a year, slightly less than Americans (1,800 hours a year), though more than Germans (1,440). But the statistics are misleading because they do not count “free overtime”. Other tallies show that one in three men aged 30 to 40 works over 60 hours a week. Half say they get no overtime. Factory workers arrive early and stay late, without pay. Training at weekends may be uncompensated.

I’m glad that the Economist has finally mentioned that some statistics can be misleading, as it has been misled by them itself on many occasions.

(”Something I found off the internet” by James, the Sexy and Virile Korea Studies Guru)

During the past 20 years of economic doldrums, many companies have replaced full-time workers with part-time ones. Regular staff who remain benefit from lifetime employment but feel obliged to work extra hours lest their positions be made temporary. Cultural factors reinforce these trends. Hard work is respected as the cornerstone of Japan’s post-war economic miracle. The value of self-sacrifice puts the benefit of the group above that of the individual.

Toyota, which is challenging GM as the world’s largest carmaker, is often praised for the efficiency and flexibility of its workforce. Ms Uchino has a different view. “It is because so many people work free overtime that Toyota reaps profits,” she says. “I hope some of those profits can be brought back to help the employees and their families. That would make Toyota a true global leader.” The company is promising to prevent karoshi in future.

(”Suicide Pact” by The Flip)

With my plans for coming blog posts, and me discussing Japan almost as often as Korea these days, then I’m flirting with the idea of expanding the scope of this blog to encompass not just Korean but also Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese social issues (”An irreverent look at Northeast Asian social issues”™), but for now this link to “Overwork Kills 600,000 Chinese” will have to do for the Sino side of things. But with the phenomenon in Japan being so well-known that even Americans Western teenagers who couldn’t locate Japan on a map may have heard of it (I’ve seen it on the “funny” section of the nightly news before), then my argument that Korean workplace culture is so similar to that of Japan would imply that there would be a wealth of material on it, and indeed there is, at least in Korean: a search of 과로사 on Naver reveals many self-help sites, internet clubs (this is Korea remember), news, books, and you can even watch a few videos of salarymen killing themselves if you’re so inclined.

In English, I only found this downloadable pdf file entitled ”Depression a reality in Korean workplace“ from 2006, still interesting, but only indirectly related. To try to help fill the gap, I found this Korean article on the original Economist article above and fell asleep translating it last night, but in the cold light of day have realised that its just a carbon copy of the original (it would have been fun to translate it and then see the original though). Over the next week, I’ll keep looking for easy short, readily translatable Korean articles on the subject, especially on Korean rather than Japanese cases, and get stuck into them once I’m back in Korea next week.

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