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Make companies pay extra compensation if employees work overtime. This is the standard practice at many (but not all) Japanese companies with an overtime cultu

Make companies pay extra compensation if employees work overtime. This is the standard practice at many (but not all) Japanese companies with an overtime culture. "Service overtime" (サービス残業) -- uncompensated overtime -- is widely perceived to be abusive, and the abusiveness of this practice is deployed by defenders of the status quo as "We're not abusive; we paid every one of those 80 hours at time and a quarter." It's priced into the expectations, literally -- my offer letter from my previous employer in Japan had two columns in it, the "formal offer" and the "offer assuming overtime pay[+]", with the number quoted at me being the total salary inclusive of their estimate of overtime. (30 hours of compensated overtime a month.) (This was... ahem... an optimistic estimate.)

rimliu 9y ago
I was going to ask "optimistic-in what way?" but then I realised that 30hours a month makes for about 1.5hour a day, so the number of overtime hours was most likely very underestimated…
zhemao 9y ago
So then why do they do it? Why would you pay 1.25x per hour worked when you could hire more employees and have everyone work normal hours. It's one thing to have crunch time. It's another for excessive overtime to be the normal way of doing things.
- watwut 9y ago
  As far as they are concerned, this is normal hours.
gerbal 9y ago
So Japan has issues with a poor job market and people working themselves to death? It seems like raising the mandatory pay rate for overtime would really reduce the issue. A sliding scale that increases the overtime pay rate for additional hours would nip this in the bud and improve the labor market. Something like 1.5x for > 50 hours/week and 2x for >60 hours /week would put tremendous pressure on companies to hire more staff rather than working their employees to death. Also it wouldn't nuke the salaries of those depending on overtime pay to make ends meet. Fewer overtime hours, same pay.

rimliu 9y ago

I was going to ask "optimistic-in what way?" but then I realised that 30hours a month makes for about 1.5hour a day, so the number of overtime hours was most likely very underestimated…

zhemao 9y ago

So then why do they do it? Why would you pay 1.25x per hour worked when you could hire more employees and have everyone work normal hours. It's one thing to have crunch time. It's another for excessive overtime to be the normal way of doing things.

watwut 9y ago
As far as they are concerned, this is normal hours.

gerbal 9y ago

So Japan has issues with a poor job market and people working themselves to death? It seems like raising the mandatory pay rate for overtime would really reduce the issue. A sliding scale that increases the overtime pay rate for additional hours would nip this in the bud and improve the labor market. Something like 1.5x for > 50 hours/week and 2x for >60 hours /week would put tremendous pressure on companies to hire more staff rather than working their employees to death. Also it wouldn't nuke the salaries of those depending on overtime pay to make ends meet. Fewer overtime hours, same pay.