SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Onuki, a 31-year-old salesman, is headed to the train station to catch the 12:24 a.m. train, the last one of the night, back to his home in Yokohama. The train will quickly fill up with other professional working men.
At about 1:30 a.m., after having made a pit stop at a convenience store to grab a sandwich, Onuki arrives home. When he opens the bedroom door, he accidentally wakes his wife, Yoshiko, who just recently fell asleep after working an 11-hour day. She chides him for making too much noise and he apologizes.
Then, with his food still digesting and his alarm set for 7 a.m., he creeps into bed, ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Over the past two decades, stories like the Onukis' have become commonplace in Japan. Young couples are fighting to make relationships work amid a traditional work culture that expects men to be breadwinners and women to be homemakers. It's a losing battle. Many newlyweds are forced to watch their free time disappear, surrendering everything from the occasional date night to starting a family.
The daily constraints have made for a worrisome trend. Japan has entered a vicious cycle of low fertility and low spending that has led to trillions in lost GDP and a population decline of 1 million people, all within just the past five years. If left unabated, experts forecast severe economic downturn and a breakdown in the fabric of social life.
"Adult diapers have outsold baby diapers in Japan for the last six years."
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:48PM (4 children)
Have workers clock in and out of the building. Remote workers should be tied into the system, so that anyone who logs in remotely and works from home is racking up time on their timesheet. Optionally, include a function that logs remote users out when they've reached Z hours of work.
Employee time logs must be kept, and can be audited by the government, who can fine the employer (fines are both punitive, and to compensate employees (with interest)) if employers are found to be ignoring the law.
Alternatively / additionally, pass a law mandating that any work above X hours per week (Where X is less than Y, the maximum allowed work hours per week) must be paid overtime at time and a half / doubletime. Existing contracts that waive overtime must be renegotiated, and employers may not decrease salaries during those renegotiations. Suddenly employers are a lot less willing to let their employees work overtime, and employees are a lot more willing to inform the authorities about any employer who doesn't keep accurate timekeeping logs.
Yeah, there will be ways around it (OK, finish that 40 page report at home and bring it in tomorrow / call all these customers from home tonight using your own phone) but if it's enough to keep most employers honest, that will change the culture so that his kind of thing is no longer regarded as acceptable. From there on it gets much easier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:29PM (3 children)
Fining the companies will not help because the overwork problem in Japan is not really caused by employers. The workers literally do not want to leave -- there is too much social stigma associated with it. It is very likely that employees will simply falsify their time logs, without too much change to the status quo.
Even if you smoehow force people to leave the building at 5PM sharp, your workers will simply move as a group to the nearest bar and continue working there.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday May 24 2017, @08:59AM (2 children)
OK, then they also need a massive advertising campaign: "Want to give your best to your company? Go home and screw your wife!" (followed by small print evidence of how that is good for your productivity.)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:02PM (1 child)
And what problem actually is being solved here? We need to keep in mind that we have democratic societies here and people are choosing to work these hours.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday May 24 2017, @04:38PM
The advertising is to dispel the myth / break the expectation that more hours == better employee.
"Want to impress your boss? Go home and play with your kids! (statistics show that employees who spend X hours with their families are more productive yadda yadda yadda)"
There's a big difference between choosing to do something because it's what you want and choosing to do it because all your peers and your boss expect it of you and absolutely everyone else is doing it and you think you'll be cast out and derided as a loser if you don't. Face it, people can do stupid things when they get competitive and start trying to one-up each other. It's a vicious spiral of escalation that can't be broken from within, it almost always needs some external factor to break it all up.
40 years ago men were choosing to work on building sites without protective clothing. A self-reinforcing macho culture prevented individuals from making the right choices, because only sissies need to wear hardhats / steel toe caps. Men were dying stupid deaths for nothing more than bravado. Employers weren't really bothered about correcting it because (a) they too were steeped in the same culture and (b) protective gear costs money. It took legislation and advertising together to get to the point now where just about any tradesman on any building site in the first world would immediately and severely reprimand the tough guy who thinks his skull is tougher than that half-ton RSJ swinging from a crane. Needless to say, deaths / injuries on building sites are now much much lower. Are you really telling me we should have just left things as they were, because something something freedum something?