Posted on 02/06/2015 6:20:25 AM PST by Olog-hai
College-educated and gainfully employed 36-year-old Eriko Sekiguchi should be a sought-after friend or date, planning nights on the town and faraway resort vacations. But she works in Japan, a nation where workaholic habits die hard. Often toiling 14 hours a day for a major trading company, including early morning meetings and after-hours “settai,” or networking with clients, she used just eight of her 20 paid vacation days last year. Six of those days were for being sick. […]
The government wants to change all that. Legislation that will be submitted during the parliamentary session that began Jan. 26 aims to ensure workers get the rest they need. In a break with past practice, it will become the legal responsibility of employers to ensure workers take their holidays.
Japan has been studying such legislation for years. There has been more impetus for change since 2012 as a consensus developed that the health, social and productivity costs of Japan’s extreme work ethic were too high. Part of the problem has been that many people fear resentment from co-workers if they take days off, a real concern in a conformist culture that values harmony. After all, in Japan, only wimps use up all their vacation days. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
I didn’t realize that the Japanese were still workaholics. The younger ones I’ve encountered seem fascinated by American crap culture and its dubious values.
Not sure what business it is of the govt.
Why should the government be involved in this? Not their business.
“Working overtime for free, called “sah-bee-soo zahn-gyo,” or “service overtime,” is prevalent.”
I ran into this at a previous Japanese employer. You were expected to work over most days and unless you put in more than 3 hours of overtime in a single day, you weren’t paid for it. But they had excellent benefits and a generous bonus each year.
The more extreme ones of those are the “otaku”, who simply won’t work a lot of the time.
This is just a way to get more people employed, by requiring that workers take time off, others must be hired to take up the slack...............
In Japan, the government is expected to be paternalistic in a way that Westerners would find oppressive.
In financial industries it’s usually mandated as a deterrence to committing fraud.
I understand the logic, but it doesn’t work that way. An employer is thereby forced to shift the work from a more productive to a less productive worker. This results in less economic efficiency and lower average productivity.
In America, yes, but in Japan it may not be so................
Correct- that is precisely what I was saying.
Sorry, I thought you were replying to another post.
Despite good intentions, politicians cannot make any economy more efficient merely by passing more laws and further restricting employment.
Japan is the victim of their own success. Technology like robots and automated processing has made the industrial sector less needful of both low and high skilled people in large numbers and large numbers is what they have, as do we......
The bureaucratic side has been around since prior to the shoguns and came from confucionist (sp?)influences from the Chinese.
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