Working hours become a matter of life and death

As global news outlets this week played up a young employee’s suicide in Japan due to overwork and a campaign in Sweden to implement a six-hour work day, one of the best arguments in workers’ favour didn’t come from editorial writers or labour-beat reporters. A Web-board poster hit the nail on the head in saying that long or short working hours shouldn’t be tied to present or future automation, because such a perspective is wrong from the very beginning.
Working hours, the online commentator said, must be based solely on the requirements of human life, not business revenue. Human conditions alone must dictate an employer’s policy on how long or how hard the staff works. Bringing automation into the equation can twist management’s thinking, often resulting in longer working hours for the humans still on the payroll. Simply put, if someone worked eight hours a day before the robots arrived, they must continue working eight hours afterwards.
Employers would tend to disagree. The argument that work is now made easier always ends in employees having to work longer. It’s seen as an executive decision, based on reduced overhead expenses. When money is the bottom line, it’s hard to argue with that. And fast-evolving information technology doesn’t help resolve the matter, because the concept of “ideal employees” – the machines the bosses can count on 24 hours a day – has edged closer and closer to reality.
But the incident in Japan, in which an employee of advertising giant Dentsu killed herself, reportedly due to work-related pressure, served as a reminder that workers are human after all. An executive of the company has resigned in a display of regret and responsibility. He also apologised to the woman’s family for the fact that she had to work long hours, but it remains to be seen whether Japanese society, known for dedication to work and discipline, is having a knee-jerk reaction or a genuine rethink.
In Sweden, a pilot scheme for a six-hour working day is facing criticism from those cringing at the high cost of the experiment, which has forced the recruitment of extra workers. The project might be abandoned despite reports that employees whose daily work shifts were reduced from eight to six hours were feeling happier and healthier and their home lives significantly improved. The workers involved also took less sick leave.
Advocates of reduced working hours point out that labour happiness and better health can also improve creativity, to the benefit of employers. But this is a theory without statistics to back it up, so business profits still dictate the bottom line. Fewer working hours continues to translate as more expenses for business owners, who might also feel it takes longer to achieve their goals.
The Swedish campaign seeks to change a long-held belief about what’s required to succeed in business and a career. Such a belief has been followed to the maximum in Japan, a country where hard work is seen as the marrow in the economy’s backbone, where employees are expected to place their company above all else, and where there’s a specific word – karoshi – for working oneself to death. In the month before her suicide, Matsuri Takahashi was clocking more than 100 hours of overtime, reportedly against her will. Premier Shinzo Abe is now pushing labour reforms that would curtail the burden placed on employees. That pits him against the vocal defenders of a strong social tradition against which workers dare not complain. Other governments trying  to establish healthier and happier work conditions face the same challenges, albeit not as extreme as in the country where Takahashi took her own life.