Japan Press Weekly

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2014 April 23 - May 6 [LABOR]

Death from overwork not caused by long working hours according to business leader

Business leaders at the April 22 meeting of the Labor Ministry’s advisory council on working hour regulations indicated that long working hours will not significantly affect workers’ health conditions.

At the meeting whose members are scholars, lawyers, employers, and workers, Shintani Nobuyuki of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) emphasized the need to give top priority on preventing deaths from overwork.

In response to this, Suzuki Shigeya on behalf of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) cited heart and brain diseases in order to play down the link between long working hours and death by work-induced illnesses. While the Labor Ministry’s guideline on work-related illnesses states that working more than 80 hours of overtime a month could acutely induce fatal diseases such as heart strokes and cerebral hemorrhage, he said that these diseases are “aggravated by workers’ ages and lifestyles.”

Tokyo University Professor Iwamura Masahiko, who chaired the meeting, refuted Suzuki’s claim by saying that working conditions have a decisive effect on the occupational fatalities while age may also be a contributing factor.

Another representative of the business world stated that as family and social lives are getting more stressful, you cannot tell if a mental disease is caused by the working environment or not even if the disease is suffered by a worker working for long hours for weeks.