As the annual union-management wage negotiations effectively get under way, many of the long-standing problems in the nation's labor/employment practice come under increased scrutiny, such as the notoriously long working hours of many corporate employees and the steep gap in conditions between regular full-time employees and workers on irregular positions. In its policy for this year's union talks released this week, Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) urged its member firms to take steps to eliminate the problem of overwork of their employees. The question is how serious the businesses will indeed be about taking action beyond mere slogans.

The problem of overwork has been highlighted once again — and put the business community on edge — following revelations last year that a 24-year-old worker of Dentsu Inc. killed herself in 2015 after suffering from depression caused by overwork, and that the overwork of employees at the nation's top advertisement agency had not ended even after the 1991 suicide of another young Dentsu worker exposed the responsibility of business management to prevent the health impairment of their staff from excessive work hours, but continued as a prevalent problem among its workers that violated agreements with its labor union. The scandal led to the resignation of Dentsu's president, and an investigation is under way for suspected violation of labor laws.

Overwork-induced health damage of workers, including ones that lead to their deaths or suicides, has been a problem since the late 1980s. But government reports show that the root problem of long working hours remain widespread among Japanese firms. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said this week that its supervision last year of some 10,000 companies suspected of having employees who work more than 80 hours of overtime a month — a criteria at which workers' health problems would be linked to overwork — showed that 44 percent of the firms engaged in violation of labor laws, including overtime work exceeding the limits under their union agreement. Some were found to have manipulated the work records of the employees to make it look like they worked fewer overtime hours than they actually did. Some 2,400 companies had employees who clocked more than 100 hours of monthly overtime, including 116 firms with staff working overtime for more than 200 hours a month.