When Stuart Nomimizu relocated from Birmingham, England, to Tokyo his friends and family in the UK started to worry. Not only did they rarely hear from him, but he seemed to always be at the office from early morning until very late at night. His working hours seemed so extreme, that they didn't always believe he was working as hard as he said.
To convince them, he documented one week of his life as a so-called "salaryman" in Tokyo's financial-services industry and posted it online so they could understand his new lifestyle.
The resulting video went viral on YouTube, racking up more than one million views. It depicts a hectic week in 2015 during the financial sector's busy season — from January to March — when Nomimizu clocked in 78 working hours and 35 sleeping hours between Monday and Saturday (before working another six hours that Sunday, which you don't see in the video).
[...] It got to the point where Nomimizu was putting in so many 80-hour work weeks that he fainted in his apartment one night and came-to right next to a TV stand, which he'd narrowly missed. When the rush period was finally over, he says the entire office got "horrendously sick."
While Nomimizu's excessive workload was somewhat temporary, he says "there are people working for companies in Tokyo that do that sort of workload and have that life day-in, day-out all year long." Indeed, marathon workdays are so entrenched in the culture that there's even a Japanese word, karoshi, that quite literally means "overwork death."
Source: If you want to earn more, work less
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Lester on Tuesday January 17 2017, @11:26AM
From the article:
But the article forgot to mention that machines are expensive, workers can be replaced with no great investment. We like to think that white collar jobs are no easily replaced. Wrong, they are. Even easier than manual jobs. Nowadays office jobs are almost the same in every company, they use the same software, the same tools, the same process, the same organization etc etc, so you can pick an employee from a company and move him to another with almost no training. And there is a long queue of people waiting for a job, not only because of unemployment, because the new culture tells that it is good to live jumping from company to company.
So, let's stick on getting as much hours as we can from a worker and replace it when it is burned out. An employee in a year working 40 hours a week is less productive than four employees that work 70 h/week for a quarter and break down.