The Kanazawa Labor Standards Inspection Office has recognized \u201covertime work at home\u201d as an occupational disease after a woman who used to work as a teacher at an English conversation school committed suicide after working for long hours at home.
\nThis recognition is unprecedented, since in cases of at-home overtime it is very hard to know what the actual working situation is.
\nHowever, in this particular case, according to emails and information from related persons, the woman made over 2,000 \u201cvocabulary cards\u201d for explaining English words at her home after receiving instructions to do so. The Inspection Office calculated the actual time taken to make the cards, and reached the conclusion that they amounted to about 80 hours of at-home overtime work per month.
\nWhen this was added to her overtime work at the company, the result was invariably at about 100 hours of overtime work per month. Moreover, being scolded by her boss added to her mental burden, resulting in clinical depression, thus this time\u2019s recognition as an occupational disease.<\/p>\n
As a rule, at-home overtime that is not acknowledged by a company is not included in one\u2019s working hours.
\nIf a worker decides to take work home by himself and does at-home overtime, the company has no means to grasp what the actual situation is, so at-home overtime is not considered \u201cworking hours,\u201d as it is basically not instructed by the company.
\nHowever, when at-home overtime is conducted based on clear instructions given by one\u2019s boss, the time required for that does, indeed, become included in one\u2019s working hours.
\nIt is also important to note that when a worker is given more work than he can do during his regular working hours, or when there is a tacit approval of at-home overtime work, there is a possibility that this time may be considered as official working hours, assuming that, in reality, the at-home overtime has been an instruction from the company.<\/p>\n
At-home overtime comes with many risks besides the possibility of being considered an occupational disease, and the possibility that the worker may invoice the company for the extra time. The risk that information may leak is also a reality.
\nCompanies need to create rules such as \u201cforbidding at-home overtime,\u201d \u201cmaking employees apply in advance when at-home overtime is absolutely necessary,\u201d and \u201ctaking measures to prevent information leaking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u25c6A female teacher at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[56,85],"class_list":["post-1942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tokyo-hr-headlines-ja","tag-overtime-work","tag-overtime-work-ja"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1942"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2285,"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions\/2285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labor-consultant.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}