Death by Overtime

Most anyone who has worked has, at some point or another, done some overtime. Work in an office long enough and your time will come up. There are some people who are on perpetual overtime. They come in before most everyone else and are there for hours beyond everyone else too. It's not because they can't finish their work within a normal eight hour period but rather, in the case of many middle management types, it's simply because they number of extraneous responsibilities they have outside of their normal work routine is enough to have them spending extra hours at the office. Some argue it's because they want to stay ahead while others are just looking for an excuse to avoid going home to an unhappy home life. Whatever the reason, more and more people are doing it. The question is, is this really a healthy thing?

There was recently a court case in Japan where the wife of a Toyota employee sued her local Labor Ministry claiming that her husband died of exhaustion from all the overtime he was putting in at work and was thus eligible for Worker's Compensation. The Labor Ministry saw it differently. Kenichi Uchino was the quality control manager at the Toyota Factory in Toyota City. According to his wife, Uchino was regularly working over 80 hours beyond his normal working day and at times spent upwards of 115 extra hours at work per week due to his responsibilties. That being said, it's little wonder that Uchino collapsed at work in February 2002 and died at the young age of 30. After his death, Uchino's wife went to claim compensation for his death and was refused on the grounds that there was no proof that his death resulted from overwork. In the end the courts ruled in her favor and nearly six years after the fact, Uchino's wife was compensated for the loss of her husband to the office.

Apparently the epidemic (if it can be considered one) is serious enough in Japan that they actually have a word for 'death by overwork' and that word is "karoshi". I find it a bit disturbing to hear that there is actually a word for this type of death. I mean think about it; we have lots of causes for death in the world but only the most serious or most common get descriptive names that are mutually exclusive to that form of death. The fact that the work culture in Japan is apparently such that overtime is not an exception but an an expectation is what makes it not so surprising. Over here in the states there are certain rules to how long a person can work but it doesn't always get enforced as it should.

Case in point are doctors and med-students who work for hours and hours on end. My question has always been that while this requirement gets a doctor ready to think on their feet while struggling to save a life, does it make them a better doctor? By keeping someone up for hours and hours and then asking them to consult a patient or perform a surgery, isn't that a bit dangerous? I don't know about you but I'd rather have a doctor who had a good night's sleep rather than a dozen cups of coffee looking me over before surgery. Whatever the reasoning or rationale it is something that I often feel fortunate not to have gone through or experienced myself.

I have worked overtime on numerous occasions. I have been stuck at the office due to pending deadlines and a dearth of work. Some of the stress that comes from this situation is what ultimately takes a toll on someone. It's partially because you are so stressed out in wanting to complete your work while worrying about non-work related things at the house that you begin to get stressed. As it is, we are gaining reputations for having increasingly sedentary lifestyles which contribute to heart disease and other problems. If we're sitting on our butts for even longer than 80 hours a week, aren't we only going to exacerbate the problem? If the levels of stress or deadlines that some bosses implement on their staff can somehow be brought to normal or manageable levels, perhaps the rest of the world will avoid having to develop a word in their respective language that's the equivalent of "karoshi".