In the first week of November, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) launched a month-long campaign on the risk of death from overwork, opening a confidential hotline to encourage workers in the country to complain about their bosses. did.
Hotline operators are bracing for widespread reports of workplace misery, from unpaid wages and harassment to poor conditions and failures to protect mental health, as they have done every November for the past few years. I was preparing myself.
However, the central objective, as always, was to investigate the issue of long working hours. This issue has been at the heart of Japan’s labor relations for decades, entrenching the idea that Japanese workplaces thrive on unpaid overtime, presenteeism, and extended working hours. And forced.
The situation is changing, and average working hours appear to be on the decline. But scholars say hidden factors complicate the situation. Excessive overtime can be hidden by the country’s army of part-time employees. Other strategies, such as giving staff “in name only” management positions and allowing them to work hours well beyond official timestamp limits, also obscure reality.
However, with each passing year, the same scholars point to a more pressing problem: The bigger problem is that Japan faces another major challenge: rapid aging and population decline, leading to the problem of overwork. The question is whether it is improving or worsening. For example, are we moving forward with long-awaited productivity improvements, such as digitization and automation, quickly enough to make a difference?
Labor supply is becoming increasingly tight in many sectors of the economy. This is due in part to demographic trends, but also to low labor market mobility, which limits the movement of labor between low- and high-demand sectors.
In some areas, such as wages, these shortages are helping workers. Keisuke Nakamura, a labor researcher, said the scarcity of workers and the ever-increasing need for companies to attract and retain workers will put more pressure on bosses to compromise on working hours. He states that he is deaf. But he also cautioned that labor shortages can put pressure on workers to “fill” the gap, often resulting in long hours of unreported overtime.
Ten years have passed since Japan’s Law on Prevention of Death and Injury from Overwork came into effect. He said the bill was passed by Congress in recognition of the fact that the situation had worsened and “grew to be a serious social concern in Japan.”
Broader progress looks mixed when it comes to some of the latest headline numbers. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’s 2024 national survey of more than 26,000 companies, employees reported working illegal overtime in 44.5% of these organizations, an increase of 1.9 percentage points from the previous year’s survey. did.
At the same time, however, the overall trend in average working hours shows a steady decline for both men and women. A government report that tracks work patterns since 1973 shows that average weekly work hours have fallen from 50 hours to less than 45 hours for men and from about 45 hours to less than 35 hours for women, the lowest in the U.S. This is close to the average for all non-agricultural workers.
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The government’s obligation to conduct an annual karoshi prevention campaign and associated survey is expressly incorporated into the 2014 law. But even more powerful than that law was the 2018 Work Style Reform. It was a series of measures phased in over several years that, among other things, capped the amount of overtime that companies could ask their employees to work at 100 hours a month. Importantly, this rule has been extended to a vast swath of small and medium-sized enterprises, which employ about 70 percent of Japan’s workforce.
The impact of this reform, along with its impact on Japan’s economy as a whole, has been most evident in the transportation sector, where strict limits on overtime for truck drivers went into effect in April.
This change, known as the “2024 problem,” is a sign that the consumer society has come to rely on 24-hour convenience stores, just-in-time delivery, and logistics systems built in an era when labor was at its limit. It issues a serious warning as to what this means. Large amounts of overtime were the norm.
In a research report released in July, the Nomura Research Institute predicted that Japan’s truck driver workforce will be 36% smaller than needed by 2030 due to curbs on working hours. This partly reflects the industry’s demographics, with 20% of drivers now over 60 years old and only 10% under 30.
Many of the ideas discussed about how to offset the 2024 problem, such as dedicated lanes for self-driving trucks, incentives for customers who don’t make quick deliveries, and switching some logistics functions from roads to the bullet train network, It’s useful.
Labor shortages appear to be driving productivity innovations that would have been less urgent when labor was readily available.
According to a recent report from the Daiwa Institute of Research, Japanese companies are increasingly thinking along similar lines, with productivity improvements urgently needed to stay in business. The think tank says companies are under pressure to streamline work processes and reduce the number of low-priority tasks.
Still, he cautioned that until such measures are fully effective, large companies will be more likely to try to compensate for tighter working-hour caps by hiring more aggressively.
Japan may be moving toward solving the problem of long working hours, but progress is still slow. A positive milestone would be deciding that the karoshi hotline is no longer needed.
