A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan’s continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.
Americans are like, shit what a rookie, I work 250 hours. This makes me a winner!
American here, I’ve done about 200 hours of OT in a month. Going much beyond that is pretty hard. During that month I went to work, stayed until I could no longer function, went home, slept, woke up, went back to work, stayed until I could no longer function… repeat for a month. Getting to 250 would have meant actively choosing not to sleep. During my month I’d be at work for 20-25 hours at a time usually, but I’d sleep until I woke up naturally before going back in.
I did 135 hour week once as a journalism intern. got fired because I didn’t do 140 (would walk to hotel, sleep 4 hours, wake up, walk back to field office - “wow,” you think, “what war was he covering?” and the answer is the war of an arts festival in northern england).
didn’t go back to journalism after that.
That sounds like it should violate all kinds of labor laws. Even if you slept the second you were off the clock and started working the second you woke up, it would only give you 4 hours of sleep, working 7 days per week… no time to even shower. You were right for quitting that nonsense.
Mine was all voluntary, so if I didn’t show up for a day, no one was going to yell at me or anything. If someone said I had to do it, I probably would have quit, lol. Throughout the time I did it, a lot of others would come in and do a day or two, then go back to their old normal work schedule with no repercussions.
oh absolutely it was illegal, and I did it with full knowledge of it, and voluntarily, for a stipend instead of pay.
just no point in being litigious when I’m just as happy to have a good story out of it.
I hope you’re in a less shitty environment now, whatever field that may be in
Why did you work that much?
It was actually kind of enjoyable. I worked in a data center that was being decommissioned. I’d work 8 hours doing my normal job, then head out into the data center with tools of destruction to enact my revenge and rip it all apart piece by piece. I wasn’t required to do it, but it was a nice break from the normal. It was like being Peter at the end of Office Space, but without needing to quit my job. The only other people working on it were basically friends at that point, so we got to hang out, and the paychecks were pretty good with all that OT. It was also nice to see physical progress to work I was doing, which is pretty rare in knowledge work. It’s not something I could do long-term, but for a few months, knowing there was a defined end, I look back at the time fondly.
Good stuff. I worked crazy like that once before too, during the Kaseya ransomware breach. Was the specialist rebuilding functioning AD and recovery efforts in over 50 companies that month. It was a wild time, everything was on fire, so it was constant triage and scary recoveries (some lost absolutely everything - test your backups folks)
Would 100% do it again but like you mentioned you knew it was very temporary. Doing that long term is insanity
What job was that, if I may ask?
I remember more than once someone on Reddit bragging about how they worked 90 hours a week. I’m like, dude, I wish I worked 10 hours a week.
Me too.
I’ve done it once when I worked for a consulting company, it was hell. The paycheck at the end of it almost made up for it though.
Holy shit, that’s roughly 7 hours across 30 days, that’s insane if they were already working 8 hour shifts every normal work day.
Holy shit. 15-18 hour shifts aren’t uncommon at all where I’m from. No wonder we placed well below Japan on work-life balance statistics.
The fact that there are places where people legitimately only work 8 hours a day is kind of mind blowing, thinking about it.
Where do you live if you don’t mind saying? That blows my mind the other way.
Colombia. Solidly placed among the worst countries in the world in terms of work-life balance.
I have a decent job and I don’t work that much, but I’m basically a freelancer, so that’s already pretty different.
Don’t worry, that’s being actively eroded. People cost too much to hire, at least according to the businesses, so they’re just gonna find ways to make less people work more and more.
Where are you from?
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Karoushi, 過労死, the wet dream of CEOs everywhere.
On top of how many? Still though, that’s insane. But with such an aged population it’s no wonder. Japan is in a vicious cycle and many other countries are getting there.
Yep. Japans declining birth rates and aging are working against it. They’re trying to keep up with current output with a smaller population. China will be facing something much worse because it struggles to attract immigration to offset population decline and will likely follow the same steps - increase hours to maintain output.
Most of the developed world has this problem, in fact. The only places where it is less evident are those where they receive enough immigration from developing countries.
Once the “developing world” eventually joins the “developed world” and begins to suffer the same declining birth issue, we are going to have to rethink our model of economics to accommodate for a shrinking global population of workers. The good news is that AI and automation might solve that problem for us, but we will have to see who can actually integrate these solutions responsibly, without consolidating all of the financial resources towards wealthy oligarchs who own the technology.
Even here in Canada we may run to that problem shortly. The cost of living here has gotten so high. At least everyday items weren’t bad when housing prices were but everything has gone up in the last year I’ve been seeing articles on immigrants moving back because of how expensive it is here. They got no money to send back let alone for themselves.
Not just Japan. China has a similar problem but the difference is they’d sooner censor people than allow them to coin a term for ‘death by overworking.’
The term “996” coined in China refers to the idea of working 12-hour shifts from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
I haven’t been able to find much information (in English,anyway) on the labor movement in Japan. The pervasiveness of unpaid overtime and stagnant wages leads me to wonder if it’s moribund?
