The toxic culture in Japan stems from the unspoken expectations.
You have a 40 hour schedule, but you’re expected to be in the office for +60. You get vacation time, but it’s shameful to use it. Women (particularly young women) aren’t given promotions or professional advancement because it’s assumed they’ll quit to become housewives as soon as they find a husband of a higher station.
All that shit you hear about microaggression, implicit bias, and structural racism run rampant in the Japanese corporate world.
At the place that I interned in software development, there was a period of time before I was there where the hours were starting to creep to long enough that the workers (salaried) were effectively being paid less than minimum wage. Legend has it that there was a mention of a lawsuit if the company didn’t shape up. One coworker who had been there at that point described it as a dark point in the company’s history. In response, they temporarily switched to hourly and 40 hours a week.
Later, some people apparently started working over 40 hours a week of their own volition. Workaholics, I guess. At the behest of one of the people on my team, the CIO talked to them about sticking to normal hours. Part of it was that people just aren’t great developers after already working a long day. The other part was that no one else wanted to slide back into those long working hours. A few people also had had kids in the intervening years, so I don’t think they wanted to see their hours eaten by work.
There’s some hope though. Younger people are starting to call bullshit on all this. Perhaps the fact that there’s an abudance of overworked old people everywhere is helping drive different thinking for everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQs4NERVZxc
The toxic culture in Japan stems from the unspoken expectations.
You have a 40 hour schedule, but you’re expected to be in the office for +60. You get vacation time, but it’s shameful to use it. Women (particularly young women) aren’t given promotions or professional advancement because it’s assumed they’ll quit to become housewives as soon as they find a husband of a higher station.
All that shit you hear about microaggression, implicit bias, and structural racism run rampant in the Japanese corporate world.
When Japan capped overtime to 45 hours per month
It became shameful to log your overtime
Also to get time and a half you need to work over 60 hours but you don’t get that if you aren’t logging
Yikes, that’s lawsuit territory in the US. Like, my uncle was a lawyer on a lawsuit with similar facts.
Historically Japanese lawsuits around overtime had been companies suing employees for claiming wages
At the place that I interned in software development, there was a period of time before I was there where the hours were starting to creep to long enough that the workers (salaried) were effectively being paid less than minimum wage. Legend has it that there was a mention of a lawsuit if the company didn’t shape up. One coworker who had been there at that point described it as a dark point in the company’s history. In response, they temporarily switched to hourly and 40 hours a week.
Later, some people apparently started working over 40 hours a week of their own volition. Workaholics, I guess. At the behest of one of the people on my team, the CIO talked to them about sticking to normal hours. Part of it was that people just aren’t great developers after already working a long day. The other part was that no one else wanted to slide back into those long working hours. A few people also had had kids in the intervening years, so I don’t think they wanted to see their hours eaten by work.
There’s some hope though. Younger people are starting to call bullshit on all this. Perhaps the fact that there’s an abudance of overworked old people everywhere is helping drive different thinking for everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQs4NERVZxc