The legal cap on overtime work hours, agreed on this week between business and labor leaders at the urging of the Abe administration, fails to provide sufficient minimum protection against long working hours that impair the health of corporate employees. The regulation, which will allow a worker to clock monthly overtime just shy of 100 hours during busy seasons, will hardly serve as a guarantee to stop excessively long work hours from causing the deaths and suicides of employees — as it ostensibly sought to achieve.

Both the management of businesses and labor unions need to make further efforts to ensure that the excessive overtime hours that threaten the health of corporate workers will not be the norm. The government also needs to crack down on widespread practices that make work-hour regulations meaningless by manipulating employees' work records.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who pushed for a ceiling on overtime hours as a key part of his "work-style reform" drive, hailed the agreement as a "historic reform." His administration will prepare an amendment to the Labor Standards Law based on the agreement.