Stop working after 8 pm, Tokyo orders civic staff

Tokyo: Tokyo's new governor, Yuriko Koike, is setting up overtime prevention teams to avoid municipal employees from working after 8 pm, in an overtime crackdown.

She said that excessive work hours were a major problem in Japanese society, resulting in poor health and less time spent with families. The overtime prevention teams would be set up in the metropolitan government, which employs around 170,000 people.

They will be charged
with carrying out "overtime reduction marathons", Koike said, by turning off the lights in offices. Anyone who stays back after 8 pm would be subjected to "strict monitoring", she added.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average Japanese worker puts in 33.25 hours a week and this figure fails to take in the concept of what is known as "service overtime" in Japan, meaning unpaid extra hours.

Service overtime was an accepted practice at Japanese corporations but became more common since the national economy remained weak.

The government has also drawn up revisions to legislation that would force employees to take all the paid holidays to which they are entitled every year.

Japanese workers took only 48.8 per cent of their annual paid leave, according to a survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Industry. The government has set a target of raising that to 70 per cent by 2020.