CEO of Japan's top ad firm to resign after new recruit's death from overwork
21 replies, posted
[quote]The head of Japan’s biggest advertising agency is to resign, as prosecutors launch an investigation into his firm for enforcing excessive overtime after an overworked employee took her own life.
Tadashi Ishii, the president of Dentsu, said he would step down next month, just over a year after Matsuri Takahashi killed herself at a company dormitory in a case Japanese authorities classified as karoshi, or death from overwork.
“Excessive amounts of work is something that should never be allowed to happen,” Ishii told reporters. “I deeply regret and feel responsible for this. I will take full responsibility and resign as president at January’s board meeting.”
Ishii said he regretted his failure to tackle the company work practices that led to Takahashi’s death, eight months after joining Dentsu in April 2015. “We deeply regret failing to prevent the overwork of our new recruit. I offer my sincere apologies,” he said.
Takahashi, 24, had worked more than 100 hours of overtime a month leading up to her death. In September, a labour standards inspection office in Tokyo said she had been driven to kill herself due to stress brought on by long working hours.
Japan has spent years struggling to address karoshi. About 2,000 people a year kill themselves due to work-related stress, according to the government, while other victims die from heart attacks, strokes and other conditions brought on by spending too much time at work.
Weeks before she died on Christmas Day 2015, Takahashi posted on social media: “I want to die.” Another message read: “I’m physically and mentally shattered.”
Her death prompted calls for Japan to overhaul its work culture, which often forces employees to put in long hours of overtime as a demonstration of corporate loyalty.
Dentsu’s notoriously demanding work practices have long been the target of criticism and it was raided by regulators last month amid suspicions that it had broken labour standards law.[/quote]
[url]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/29/head-of-japans-top-ad-firm-to-quit-after-new-recruits-death-from-overwork[/url]
hopefully this causes a change in the Japanese work culture and leads to more family time for the Japanese. they're pretty much a dying nation due to not having enough kids
[QUOTE=Svinnik;51598082]hopefully this causes a change in the Japanese work culture and leads to more family time for the Japanese. they're pretty much a dying nation due to not having enough kids[/QUOTE]
i'd rate you optimistic if i could, ain't the first time someone's died from overworking
[QUOTE=elowin;51598134]i'd rate you optimistic if i could, ain't the first time someone's died from overworking[/QUOTE]
first time the CEO of a major company resigned in shame because of it though
[QUOTE=Svinnik;51598082]hopefully this causes a change in the Japanese work culture and leads to more family time for the Japanese. they're pretty much a dying nation due to not having enough kids[/QUOTE]
I don't think having a low birthrate is bad when loads of jobs are slowly disappearing because of automation.
And then look at this:
[video=youtube;E7kor5nHtZQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ[/video]
You want to make it even more impossible to catch the subway?
[QUOTE=CarnolfMeatla;51598206]I don't think having a low birthrate is bad when loads of jobs are slowly disappearing because of automation.
And then look at this:
[video=youtube;E7kor5nHtZQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ[/video]
You want to make it even more impossible to catch the subway?[/QUOTE]
a population in decline is several magnitudes worse than a population which is stable/slowly growing
the reason cities like tokyo are so busy is because people keep moving there. the japanese countryside is increasingly desolate and loads of smaller towns are being abandoned
[QUOTE=CarnolfMeatla;51598206]I don't think having a low birthrate is bad when loads of jobs are slowly disappearing because of automation.
And then look at this:
[video=youtube;E7kor5nHtZQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ[/video]
You want to make it even more impossible to catch the subway?[/QUOTE]
old people account for ~32% of japan's population, so a low birthrate is gonna put a heavy tax burden on the younger population
but yeah it's not "japan is dying" bad like the media makes it out to be
[QUOTE=Perrine;51598249]old people account for ~32% of japan's population, so a low birthrate is gonna put a heavy tax burden on the younger population
but yeah it's not "japan is dying" bad like the media makes it out to be[/QUOTE]
actually it is as bad as the media is making it out to be
fertility rates are stagnant and this is continuing
the full impact of this won't be felt for a few more decades, but japan is certainly in a major death spiral right now that is their biggest problem now - more than anything else
Hey, I wouldn't mind going over there and helping the cause :q:
[sp]someone had to say it[/sp]
[QUOTE=chipsnapper2;51598305]Hey, I wouldn't mind going over there and helping the cause :q:
[sp]someone had to say it[/sp][/QUOTE]
you had to start the fire, huh
its not even a matter of libido, it's the fact that Japanese work culture puts people in high-stress always-busy situations for years on end. trying to make ends meet, fulfilling family duties, barely scraping by on regular life -- getting into a relationship(let alone having children) is a privilege reserved for people who make it successfully and have lots of spare time & money. That's why the Japanese sex toy industry is so huge; it's easier to just physically satisfy yourself and be done with it than have to deal with the burden of a family.
[QUOTE=Perrine;51598249]old people account for ~32% of japan's population, so a low birthrate is gonna put a heavy tax burden on the younger population
but yeah it's not "japan is dying" bad like the media makes it out to be[/QUOTE]
It's probably worse than the media is putting it out to be. Japan, if they don't fix their immigration laws, is probably going to utterly collapse within the next few decades. People will either become too old to work and put such a gigantic tax load on the country that it no longer is sustainable, or they'll work themselves to death in their old age.
They waited too long to fix the birth rate, even if they start having kids now it isn't going to be helpful until at least 18 years from now, and by then it probably will be too late. Immigration reform is the only option, however I doubt it'll happen anytime soon with their extremely xenophobic culture.
[editline]29th December 2016[/editline]
On the bright side, at least the rest of the world can study Japan's descent as the first country to reach stage 5 of the demographic transition model. Japan's culture may be amplifying the issue quite a bit, but we're already starting to see a little bit of population decline across the developed world. Eventually all other countries will have to deal with this very same problem, and perhaps by studying Japan's demise can we prevent our own.
Worth mentioning lower birthrates are happening in pretty much in every developed country (and it's starting to happen in some developing ones as well), the only reason it doesn't seem like it, is due to immigration, japan is incredibly strict with immigration, and that's why their population is going down.
[QUOTE=Wizards Court;51599988]Worth mentioning lower birthrates are happening in pretty much in every developed country (and it's starting to happen in some developing ones as well), the only reason it doesn't seem like it, is due to immigration, japan is incredibly strict with immigration, and that's why their population is going down.[/QUOTE]
They're not nearly as down as Japan's though
[QUOTE=Perrine;51598155]first time the CEO of a major company resigned in shame because of it though[/QUOTE]
was it really in shame thought, when it took a full year to resign?
i was watching this video of a japanese talking about this
It's a vicious cycle of work, sleep four hours, go back to work
with no time to even spend with their friends and families, and with the high expectations on you by your company, and over 105 hours of overtime
people are bound to lose their shits
Japan desperately needs labor laws at this point. This is straight up 1900s industrial America shit.
[QUOTE=Mr.Brown;51600647]
It's a vicious cycle of work, sleep four hours, go back to work
[/QUOTE]
Four out of 24?
Thank god I'm not Japanese.
Immigration also won't work forever so you can't really just say "just let immigrants in to solve this."
It's probably necessary for now but the third world of going to face similar problems, and most developing countries have already been experiencing slowing growth. I have to imagine eventually some of them might actually wind up banning emigration, because desperate western nations keep sucking up their youths needed to grow the economy as their birth rates fall nearer and nearer to replacement rates.
We're going to have to figure out other ways to encourage childbirth. With Japan though it's pretty obvious what steps they can begin with, already outlined in this thread. There isn't any known way to really resolve this yet but they can at least try to start raising it a bit.
[QUOTE=CarnolfMeatla;51598206]I don't think having a low birthrate is bad when loads of jobs are slowly disappearing because of automation.
And then look at this:
[video=youtube;E7kor5nHtZQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ[/video]
You want to make it even more impossible to catch the subway?[/QUOTE]
Do you really think Japan is the only one with this? Go to India. Seriously, I do not get why people are so surprised by stuff like this supposedly "unique" to Japan, it is really not that surprising once you explore situations around the world.
And are you saying that you DO want jobs to disappear? :speechless:
Also, job loss because of automation is irrelevant for the kind of firm in question in the article, or rather office work in general (which is pretty much every business in the middle of large cities like Tokyo), because the kind of work involved just cannot be automated. Even then, I do not think that jobs are disappearing because of automation. Yes, factory jobs are being replaced by automation, but at the same time, who is going to make the automation devices? Go look up some unemployment rate statistics anyhow, at least in the states it actually has been decreasing or at least not that much different than maybe 10 or 20 years ago, and it is certainly even lower than that in Japan.
Now going back to the topic, hopefully this will lead to improvement in Japanese labor legislation, or at least better enforcement of it. Perhaps the reason why people do not want to have children is because they are worried their children will have to deal with stuff like this.
[editline]31 December 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=TheNerdPest14;51601302]Thank god I'm not Japanese.[/QUOTE]
I think there are much worse situations you could be in...
[QUOTE]Also, job loss because of automation is irrelevant for the kind of firm in question in the article, or rather office work in general (which is pretty much every business in the middle of large cities like Tokyo), because the kind of work involved just cannot be automated. Even then, I do not think that jobs are disappearing because of automation. Yes, factory jobs are being replaced by automation, but at the same time, who is going to make the automation devices?[/QUOTE]
Automation isn't limited to manual labor. Office jobs [i]will[/i] get replaced too as AI gets more and more advanced.
Automation device design also isn't going to make up for all the lost jobs, that's the point of designing automation devices in the first place.
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