Japan firm under investigation after suicide of employee who worked 200 hours of overtime a month

TOKYO — Labour authorities have summoned the president of Kansai Electric Power Co to give guidance following the overwork-related suicide of one of its employees, amid government efforts to rein in excessive working hours, informed sources said Sunday (Jan 15).

The Tsuruga Labour Standard Inspection Office handed a paper to President Shigeki Iwane on Jan 6 ordering the Osaka-based utility to check the working hours of all employees in managerial positions, given that the employee who killed himself last April held a management post although the status was apparently only nominal.

The employee, a section chief in his 40s, worked more than 100 hours — sometimes around 200 hours — of overtime per month prior to his suicide, as he was pressed for time to complete the process for seeking regulatory approval to extend the operating life of two of the utility’s ageing nuclear reactors.

A lawyer who specialises in handling cases of “karoshi”, or death from overwork, said it is rare for authorities to ask for an investigation into the working hours of managerial personnel and not ordinary workers.

Under the Labour Standards Law, people in positions of supervision or management are exempted from labour hour restrictions and do not receive overtime pay. The provision tends to lead to lax management of working hours for people in such positions, experts say.

Dr Koji Morioka, an expert on the issue and professor emeritus at Kansai University, said whether to categorise a certain position as “management-level” is currently at the discretion of companies and the relevant rule is often “abused”.

He also said a person who works 200 hours of overtime “cannot be called a person in a position of supervision or management.”

Based on the latest regulatory order, Kansai Electric is now expected to report to the Labour Standard Inspection Office the working hours of all management-level employees over the past two years. It will also check extra work they have done at home.

A Kansai Electric official said, “We take the guidance sincerely and will continue to make efforts to appropriately manage labour hours.”

The sources said Kansai Electric had not violated laws in connection with the suicide. But the company still has an obligation to pay extra wages for late-night overtime work and monitor the labour hours of people in management-level positions.

The employee who committed suicide is also believed to have taken work home, but the labour office has not been able to confirm the exact numbers of hours worked at home, prompting it to take the latest move.

The employee was in charge of work that would decide the fate of Kansai Electric’s two nuclear reactors at the Takahama plant in Fukui Prefecture. He committed suicide at a hotel in Tokyo in mid-April during a business trip and the Tsuruga labour office in the prefecture concluded in October that overwork led him to kill himself.

Nuclear regulators in June allowed the reactors to continue to operate beyond 40 years. But if the safety screening process had not ended by early July, the utility would likely have had to decide to scrap the units.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is stepping up efforts to curb excessive working hours after labour authorities determined in September that Matsuri Takahashi, an employee of advertising giant Dentsu Inc who committed suicide in December 2015 aged 24, had died from overwork. The news of her suicide caused an uproar over endemic overwork at leading Japanese companies. KYODO NEWS