August 25, 2018

The Labor Ministry has announced that it found labor law violations at more than 18,000 business establishments in fiscal 2017 as a result of its supervisory inspections of facilities that had been suspected of having problems related to legal working hours.

This indicates that the problem of overwork is serious in Japan, posing a serious challenge to the Abe government’s pro-business “work-style reform” bills to drastically relax work hours rules which became law this year.

According to the Labor Ministry’s announcement earlier this month, between April 2017 and March 2018, the ministry carried out inspections at 25,676 business establishments in connection with alleged violations of labor regulations, and actually detected illegal activities at 18,061 or 70.3% of them. Violations of overtime hours rules were discovered at 11,592 locations and unpaid overtime at 1,868.

Of the 11,592 establishments, 5,960 or 51.4% forced workers to work more than 100 hours of overtime a month. In addition, at 8,592 or 74.1%, employees worked more than 80 hours of overtime. Monthly overtime hours of 100 hours in one month or 80 hours for two straight months are the government-set danger lines for death from overwork.