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The story
Labor Standards Inspection Offices have, as of September 1, stopped issuing blanket administrative guidance urging companies to keep overtime under 45 hours a month. The legal overtime cap itself (in principle, 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year) remains unchanged, but labor groups warn the move “could end up encouraging more overtime.” On 5ch, opinions split between those who felt it was unnecessary to uniformly restrict even workers who want to earn more, and those worried it would fuel an increase in unpaid (“service”) overtime and deaths from overwork. Many commenters also vented frustration at how toothless the Labor Standards Office is in practice, since it rarely acts unless someone files a report.
Tue, Sep 1, 12:04 PM
TBS NEWS DIG
Labor Standards Inspection Offices are, starting today, ending the blanket guidance they had been giving companies urging them to keep overtime under 45 hours a month.
Source: topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp / Original article here
What people said
Then don't complain about low pay.
Now I can work myself to death!
But didn't they say civil servants are moving to a 4-day week?
Just get a side job then.
You can sue later to claw back unpaid overtime pay.
But the statute of limitations only reaches back 2 years, so you'd have to quit first.
Just 2 years is ridiculous.
It'd be nice if you could claim back pay going back 20 years, with interest calculated as if it had been invested in an index fund the whole time.
Say you pay 1.25x or 1.5x wages for overtime but only get 1.1x the output — that's a net loss.
Expecting 1.25x-1.5x output just because someone worked past the 8-hour mark is absurd anyway.
The whole system is broken.
They were already doing 1.25x-1.5x the work to begin with — calling it overtime just makes it official.
In practice, exceeding it is fine.
The Labor Standards Office won't move unless someone reports it, and then it becomes a whole thing about who ratted.
It's not like they show up once a year to check hours either.
At this point the Labor Standards Office is basically a joke — it doesn't actually do anything useful.
Plenty of companies barely give paid leave and get away with it too.
It's nothing like speed-trap-style enforcement where you actually get caught.
You get paid that much as a regular employee?
Impressive.
It'd be fine to have companies like the old Sagawa Express — brutal work, but grind for 3 years and you can afford a house.
It's not just about whether the person themselves is okay with it.
If they wreck their health from overwork, health insurance premiums and pension payouts go up for everyone, so regular mandatory health checkups should be required.
There really are people like that.
Go home and you've got housework and childcare waiting, go out drinking and it costs money —
so they just don't want to go home and stay at the office pretending to work.
Yeah, and some just kill time at the office until their drinking party starts.
Personally I preferred early-morning shifts or night shifts over overtime.
Coming in early felt a lot less stressful than staying late.
When are people going to realize that mindset is already wrong?
Wages aren't rising in proportion to inflation, which is why people everywhere are struggling to make ends meet —
and making up that gap with more hours instead of a higher hourly rate
is just plain messed up if you think about it.
If you want overtime, just join a company that lets you do it.
Store managers, for instance, get insane amounts of overtime.
Doubling working hours doesn't double GDP either.
The more people who work, the lower the per-person pay.
The longer the hours, the lower the effective hourly wage.
The only ones who benefit from a bigger workforce and longer hours are big-company executives — over 90% of the population just gets poorer.
But I guess slaves wouldn't understand that lol
So why does the government want to increase the workforce and working hours?
There's no labor shortage!
There's just a shortage of CHEAP labor!
Because it brings in more social insurance premiums and taxes —
and because it keeps people too busy to stop and think 'wait, something's off here.'
Working people without giving them time to question anything, while cranking up taxes and deductions — that's the single most important thing when it comes to running a workforce of slaves.
Bet unlimited overtime is reserved for Japanese workers only.
Foreign workers have their hours properly tracked, so they don't go over lol
For Japanese workers, unless someone reports it, 300 hours (a month) is possible.
And once the project wraps, they just quit — no qualms about having a gap on their resume.
Over there the labor laws are different, so that approach actually pays off.
Try that in Japan and you'll lose big.
Guess you don't get how the system makes you poorer the more you work.
Sad, really.
Well, if nobody ever teaches people this simple mechanism, they'll never learn it either.
you can suddenly do like 70-100 hours of overtime a month for about half a year,
then do 45 hours a month for the other half,
as long as the yearly total stays within 720 hours?
Up until now, the situation was that you'd get 'guided' even when you were following the special clause exactly as filed.
They weren't giving real guidance to begin with.
Go report a violation and they immediately downgrade it to 'just information provided.'
Not just with labor issues — in this country, if you blow the whistle on wrongdoing, it's the whistleblower who gets frozen out of society.
No doubt about it, the whole thing is rotten at its core.
Background and key points of debate
This change does not abolish the statutory overtime cap itself — 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year, a rule with penalties under the 2019 work-style reform legislation. Rather, it’s an operational change: even when a company has filed an Article 36 agreement with a special clause, the Labor Standards Office had additionally been pushing companies to “try to keep it under 45 hours anyway” through administrative guidance, and it’s that extra layer of guidance that’s being dropped. The thread split between those arguing that people who want to earn more shouldn’t be uniformly held back, and those worried this will fuel more unpaid overtime and overwork-related deaths. There was also recurring distrust of the system’s effectiveness itself — comments like “the Labor Standards Office won’t act without a report” and “foreign workers’ hours are strictly tracked while Japanese workers’ hours can balloon indefinitely” — suggesting that, guidance or not, the perception of the Labor Standards Office’s oversight function is already quite low.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “[Labor Standards Office] Blanket guidance to keep overtime under 45 hours/month scrapped starting today — labor groups warn it “could encourage more overtime”.”
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