According to the article, Japan has taken measures to control the excessive overwork. The Japanese workforce has a long-running reputation for long hours and the country even has a word, karoshi, which means death by overwork.The government statics show that workers at 12 percent of companies work more than 100 hours of overtime monthly and 23 percent of companies have workers putting in more than 80 hours of overtime monthly. Getting companies to stop requiring excessive overtime is targetted to increase women's participation in the workforce, reforming Japan's labor market structure, which is a crucial part of Abenomics.
However, according to the Deutsche Bank, this humanitarian policy would lead to lower household income, corporate earnings, and the economy's potential output. The bank cut its economic growth forecasts for Japan to 1.0 percent in 2017 and 1.1 percent in 2018, from 1.1 percent and 1.4 percent respectively. They think because Japanese workers usually work longer than the hours they report, so the actual cut of hours would exceed the published data, which cannot be fully countered by the rise in labor productivity. This would actually decrease the family income and further decrease their consuming because they cannot afford it. From that point, this policy gonna actually worse Japan's economy.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/19/japans-move-to-end-death-by-overwork-will-drag-economic-growth-deutsche-bank.html
1 comment:
I would be curious to know what amount of hours . It seems like it would be wise to higher more workers and have them work few hours individually. Though, like you mentioned, this would not benefit the workers because it would reduce their income. However, I also wonder how much productivity the company is getting out of those overtime hours because I wonder in some cases if the productivity is much less from workers working overtime.
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