@Shappie: Retail, huh? Department store? My Mom's at Macy's. Has been in dept. stores for 40 years. That job will kill her. During December, I bet. I sympathize.

Of course, I'm not complaining, because they've already cut so much of the workers' hours and I, as one of two hourly employees in the office, could be next in line for half-days. :P

Take me for instance. My employer provides amazing benefits including a lot of flexible time off. I am on salary. Without going into detail, my lifestyle requires me to take more time off at than most at unexpected intervals if I am to maintain what I consider my top priorities. My employer also never expects me to do overtime because they set themselves up in such a way that there are enough employees to get the job done without having to do such things (rare, I know).

However, I realize that not everyone has that luxury. In addition, not everyone share's my lifestyle and values so for them working hourly or on some kind of contract based work might benefit them more.

The point I am trying to make is that choosing to go with salaried employment is a sucker's choice for some, but a genius's choice for others. It is all on a case by case basis.

Except that the Japanese are in fact actually thin. I guess I'll put it this way, the Japanese are obsessed with being thin. Americans are obsessed with wanting to be thin.

How are you supposed to do any of that if you spend all your waking hours at your job (and commuting to and from work)? When did those first four things become optional?

Well, nobody ever drove me to school when it was ninety degrees below
We had to walk buck naked through forty miles of snow
Worked in the coal mines twenty two hours a day for just half a cent
Had to sell my internal organs just to pay the rent

Translation: You spent 3.5 extra hours sitting. Do you not see how that's not the same as working at a physically intensive job? That you're not going to have a good diet if you spend your entire day at a McDonald's? That clearly it is a large amount of overtime if it affects your health?

Making the bare minimum at physically intensive jobs is not the same thing as working overtime at a desk job paying you a lot of money.

Are you like a crazy person?

If working all day isn't a big deal to you then fine, but that's you. Just because lots of people are working insane hours doesn't mean it's not demanding.

(/sarcasm)

As the saying goes: some people live to work, and some people work to live - and most people I know are in the latter category.

Clearly, someone should be threading bobbins. And another thing: If kids lost their limbs, they wouldn't be so bratty.

I'm a salaried store manager of a large chain video store and regularly work 50-60 hour weeks. No breaks. No lunches. Don't have the labor for additional help during the day, so those shifts are without anyone else in the 4,000+ square foot store. Add in incredible sales pressure and you've got a recipe for disaster.

And yes, I'm looking for something else.

@ARP:

"you think that's bad? I work X!"

Sounds like a Family Guy episode

And when you mean "work:" do you mean straight 12 hour days, i.e. you start working the minute you get there on your feet, don't get your lunch or a break or time to post on things like the consumerist, sit for meetings, maintain professional networks, talk to coworkers etc. If you can maintain a schedule like that then you're actually WORKING 12 hours a day, I don't call them a wimp when it includes a two hour lunch, internet surfing, talking to coworkers and sitting I don't count it as working

Yes, we don't have her specific work schedule, but going off the standard alone...

P.S.: That 8-8 schedule doesn't include the extra travel time to get around in many parts of Japan, as well as unpaid worktime. Not many humans can stay mentally stable working more than half of the 168hrs in a week, let alone have the physical stamina to work at peak performance in that time.

...Also, how the hell is it "clear" she died from something other than overwork? I know you likely don't, but have you any idea just how much people walk in Japan, especially Tokyo? It's absolutely absurd how much walking has to be done to get anywhere!

I've been called in for emergent care situations many times and very quickly, my 36 hour week balloons into a 50 or 60 hour week. Many times I've worked close to 24 hours straight

For example, in this case, it was the lead in charge of that project which should have been better at planning and taking input from others suggesting that things were way off the mark early on. When managers are this piss-poor, something should be done.

BF didn't whine to me, this is simply my observation as a casual (though biased) observer.

She's not "asserting her rights"; she died from something, and it's far from clear that it's "overwork", and justifying a healthy cash settlement.

I don't think she's a victim, but a lot of people here sure do, and I think it's sad.

Further, I was merely pointing out a fact of professional life in the US. I wasn't belittling professionals who only work 40 hours per week. I was pointing out that 60hrs per week isn't so ridiculously insane that a person could die from it. I have re-read my statement a couple of times, yet I still fail to see how you were so insulted by it. Perhaps it's some professional angst derived from your choice to only work 40 hours per week as you watch your colleagues who work more than that advance ahead of you.

I find it strange that that are some many comments essentially saying, "you think that's bad? I work X!" Why is that something to be proud of (for anyone)? To me, it means our priorities are messed up and we're not paid enough for our work. This whole "just work harder" meme is a sham. My grandfather worked 40-50 hour weeks at a bank in middle management, my grandmother didn't have to work, they had two kids, two cars, a moderate sized house, and had enough money for a vacation or a big-ish purchase once in a while. How did we get here?

@shepd: The problem is that with current salaries being stagnant for the middle class for years, sometimes it takes that much work to get by.

Also, a cultural thing in the West is that you don't talk about how much you make. In other countries, they talk about it all the time, so that people know where they should work and if they're being paid fairly.

@zarex42: Question, why do you need to work that many hours? Are you trying to get ahead or just trying to get by?

In the "golden era" of the middle class, they were doing 40-50 hour weeks, and didn't have a spouse working.

I wonder if its our consumer spending or stagnant wages (or both). It certainly wasn't taxes (They had a 70% income tax for the top earners).

All these hours are NOT reported. Ever.

I think suggesting that people devote more time to work than their family is, quite frankly, a ridiculous idea. 60 hours means you devote more life to work than you devote to sleeping or family (assuming an additional 1 hour per day for prep time and travel time -- heck, assuming even 15 minutes for that a day still puts you over the edge).

I find it personally insulting that you feel it is fine to belittle professionals such as myself who chose to work 40 hours a week as standard (although, on occasion, I'll work more if needed) and I feel quite justified in pointing out the lunacy of your statement.

Life is family and friends. Work is not life. Living life to work is what a machine does.

"Can I have 10 McNuggets and I want all of them boot-shaped, with bbq, mustard and honey sauce, 1 of each , please?" in Japanese?

It is normal for the Japanese to work insane numbers of hours. They also happen to have one of the highest suicide rates across the globe iirc which I am sure is contributed to more than just overtime, but overtime is a big consistency amongst their male citizens.

And I mean, it's probably a problem across all countries and professions, but the intensity of which it was expected in Japanese culture was substantially greater than countries.

@H3ion: Job stress could certainly have exacerbated it, though, causing her to die from the condition a lot earlier than she would have otherwise. Even perfectly healthy people get pretty physically and mentally wrecked by extremely long work hours.

Also, if I can take a genuine break midday, as when I'm working at home and go out for a walk or take a nap, the same amount of hours in the afternoon is much more effective.

@zarex42: So anybody who doesn't work 14-hour days is now a "wimp." Got it. Do we need to have lost limbs as children working in textile factories to qualify as manly men as well?

@zarex42: There's nothing wrong with having pride in your work, and I believe that most people do. I know I have pride in what I do, and when I'm at work I work hard. But it's a problem when you let your work rule your life enough that it's significantly detrimental to your physical and mental health. Working more hours doesn't make you a better person, nor does it mean that you have more pride in your work. It can be bad for the company, too: more hours worked doesn't necessarily mean more work done, as cited by several other responses to this article. And asserting your rights as a worker and trying to improve your life doesn't make you a "victim" - that's just a meaningless character assault.

I was extrapolating the possible number of hours she worked based on what I know of Japanese working culture and the responses in this thread, but neither of us actually knows how many hours she worked.

Before you get your panties tied in a knot know that I'm kidding...sort of.

@rocketbear79: I'm in the same boat, actually, but I've worked more physical jobs before as well. But even with drastically different kinds of work, there's not one job on earth I'd want to do for 15 hours straight. Doing that on a regular basis would, at the very least, wreck my mental and physical health.

@bohemian: I absolutely agree. Working ridiculous hours doesn't just hurt your health, it harms productivity, accuracy and efficiency. Ultimately, nobody benefits from working too long, too hard, including the short-sighted bosses who force you to do so.

What ever happened to the pride associated with that? Why are people so often resorting to the victim mentality?

And I see no evidence at all that her normal schedule was "8 to 8", plus overtime.

I'm really disappointed that the world is so full of wimps nowadays.

Like Americans in that regard.

If a woman does get married, she spends most her time taking care of kids and elderly parents in the suburbs. The husband, if he comes home at all, wakes up in the wee hours of the morning for work, takes the train in to the city (sometimes a 2 hr or more commute), then comes home late late at night. Some husbands choose to have a tiny tiny apartment/box in the city that they rent for the work week. Many big companies require after work socialization and attendance at work related gatherings, increasing time spent with coworkers and away from family.
Some young men are so freaked out by this future that they just collapse - there's a crisis of young men going into their rooms at their parents house at 17 or 20 and not emerging for 5, 10, 15 years except to find food late at night. I took a Japanese culture course recently - it was actually kind of shocking, all the crazy ways Japan is this fucked up post-modern hellhole.
That said, there are lots of exceptions to this rule in Japan, and certainly lifestyles are more hectic and stressful in big cities or for executives, just like here : )

It was the most inefficient place I have ever worked. I rarely had to put in OT at the company that stressed efficiency and let people work around their peak productivity times.

Working yourself to death is not heroic. The mentality that putting in some insane amount of hours gives you bragging rights is pretty foolish. Humans were not meant to work like that.

@Esquire99: Do the Japanese get two weeks off? Americans get it off for various national holidays, but do the Japanese give their workers days off for that?

@zarex42: "Big whoop," huh? How many hours a day do you work, and in what field? Not even the most hardcore lawyers I know go "big whoop" at working 15 hours a day.

Also, most professions where people choose/end up having to work 60+ hours a week also tend to be professions where you know, you're allowed to sit down for large parts of your job. Off hand I can't think of any sales service positions where the norm is 60+ hours a week.

@Esquire99: The average Japanese salaryman works 12 hours a day, for a regular 60-hour workweek. Add in 20 hours of overtime and he's working 80 hours a week. Does this change your assessment?

@Al Swearengen:

And by the end of it I swear I was starting to have physical reactions when it was time to go to work. When your body tells you its time to take a break, take it.

80 hours a month in overtime. So, that was in addition to her regular schedule. As we're learned, the average work week for the Japanese is 8-8. So, 12 hours a day as a base, the additionall 80 hours. So, she was probably working 15 hours a day for 6 months.

Its still a feudal society there. Only thing that's changed is the uniform.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): As I write this from my desk at work, I completely agree with you. At some point, I just can't process another insurance payment or make another call.

@PTB315:
I once did 8 hour days at a retail store, then pulled another four as a waitress straight out of college while looking for work. My bicycle was my main mode of transportation- so it was physically demanding just GETTING to work.

I only lasted about three months.
Waitressing is really brutal work, and I respect full-time waitresses, no matter the restauraunt.

80 hours a month??

I work 80 hours a week from October - March.

My only regret is that I'm salary. :(

Do you know what they call a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese in Japan?

@zarex42: As mentioned above, the average Japanese workday is "8 to 8," or 12 hours. Working that five days a week amounts to 60 hours, and 20 extra hours a week on top of that is an 80-hour week. I know people who work that many hours, but a) they're typically lawyers who don't have to run around in a hot, greasy kitchen area all day, and b) even then they tend to look (and reportedly feel) like total wrecks.

Plus, this is already a recurring problem with Japanese salarymen, and if it's typical enough that they have a term for it, it's become a pretty big problem.

So she was working, at the very most (which I doubt) 13-15 hours a day?

Big whoop.

Glad to see the old ways die hard, quite literally.

Fuck being with your family or having a life. Life is work. Work is life. We must all work together as hard as we can to build a stronger USSR comrade! Those who die from work are to be celebrated by being incorporated into the bridges they helped build!

Oh, whoops, sorry--I meant North America.

If the woman had an undiagnosed heart condition, she could have been a mattress tester 40 hours a week and still died. I don't think it was necessarily the job.

Weird shit.

I did 18-hour days 4 days a week and about a 12-hour day one day a week, plus some hours on the weekends, when I was transitioning into teaching. Granted, those figures do include travel time, but I would estimate I was looking at 14-16 hours of actual work out of that 18, which is still a lot. This was only for about two months, but yeah, I felt like death most of the time.

I know recent research has shown that at a certain point productivity plummets off a cliff, generally after about six hours, and no matter how many hours you have people work, they get about the same amount done they would get done in six hours.

I see this with lawyers chasing the billable hour -- after a certain number of hours a day, those aren't very GOOD billables. They're just billables. But since they're evaluated by their firm by billables generated rather than by quality of work or efficiency ....

(This is actually, a propos of another thread, one reason I liked working in journalism -- when my story was done, or the paper was finished, I got to go HOME. It was a "finished product" job where there wasn't a penalty for being efficient.)

Are you kidding me?

There are hordes of people trying to make ends meet and working far more than this. This is NOT a demanding schedule. And she was only 41!

It's ridiculous that a government agency would blame overwork for her death.

@MostlyHarmless:

Sounds about right in a country with efficient train service.

I was in Italy and my cousin/guide said, we have to run, the train leaves in 35 seconds. Sure enough, the doors closed in 35 seconds and away we went.

It's strange, despite that the Japanese are obsessed with being thin, they also love ginormous fast-food burgers. You can read more on that here.

@Al Swearengen: @The Porkchop Express: the woman in the article "had put in about 80 hours a MONTH in overtime".

That's not to say how many hours per WEEK she was working, but that only works out to 20 hours of overtime per week.

The gist of it was that people work way too hard, do not have time to bear kids, and even the transit system is so effingly efficient that a 15 second delay can cause you to miss a connection.

Any idea if that is actually the case?

@Al Swearengen: I did 80 hours a week for a month and that was all I could take.

since that is typical, those who do overtime probably never go home.

I could see that happening. I once did 70-80 hours a week for about 16 weeks straight and I felt like I was going to die.