In the first week of November, launching a month of campaigns around the risks of karoshi, or death by overwork, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare opened a confidential hotline that encouraged the nation’s workers to complain about their bosses. The hotline operators were braced, as they have been every November for the past few years, for a wide range of accounts of workplace miseries — from unpaid wages and harassment to poor conditions and failure to protect mental health.
9 percentage point increase from the previous year’s survey. At the same time, though, the overall trend of average working hours shows a steady decline for both men and women. In a government report tracking working patterns since 1973, the average hours worked per week fell from 50 hours for men to below 45 and from about 45 for women to below 35 — close to the average for all non-farm employees in the US.