The Labor Ministry has started a month-long campaign to raise awareness of industries about reducing excessive overwork from November 1 through November 30.
[1] Campaign against excessive overwork
The campaign is organized in line with the Act Promoting Measures to Prevent Death and Injury from Overwork, enforced in 2014. Every year, November is designated as the Karoshi (death from overwork) Prevention Awareness Month, to promote measures to eliminate long working hours and heavy workload, which are among the major causes of karoshi. During this period, the authorities encourage cooperations of employers’ associations and labor unions and hand out leaflets to increase public awareness.
[2] Details of the campaign
As part of the campaign, labor officials exercise intensive supervision for companies suspected to be making employees do excessive overwork. Following are targeted companies and focused points of the supervision.
1. Targeted companies
a) Companies that have been involved in industrial accident compensation claims regarding karoshi, resulting from a long period of hard work, etc.; companies where monthly overtime and holiday work is thought to exceed 80 hours, according to various information sources.
b) Companies suspected to be treating young workers as “disposable workforce” with apparently high turnover rate, or according to consultations or reports received by the labor standards inspection office or Hello Work public employment security office.
2. Focused items
a) Officials examine if overtime and holiday work are within the limits of the Labor-Management Agreement on Overtime (the 36 Agreement). If any law violation is found, they will provide corrective instruction.
b) Officials investigate if there are unpaid wages and provide corrective instruction in the case of law violation.
c) If companies’ work hour management is found inappropriate, they will be instructed to understand employees’ work hours correctly.
d) Companies will be instructed to provide employees who are working long hours with physician’s face-to-face guidance and implement other measures to maintain their health.
3. Sending paper to prosecutors
If the officials found serious, flagrant law violations, they will send a report on the case to prosecutors.
If a company received corrective instruction for the same law violation twice or more in a year, the Hello Work will not accept recruitment request from the company for a certain period. Other job replacement agents or local governments are also requested to take similar measures against such companies.
Companies are advised to reexamine their employees’ work hours and make sure their work hour management is appropriate.
[Reference]
Labor Ministry, “campaign for eliminating excessive overwork”
https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/roudoukijun/campaign_00004.html
Labor Ministry, “November is Karoshi Prevention Awareness Month”
https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_20865.html
*The content is based on laws and regulations as of the date of this article.
