Photo/Illutration Norihisa Tamura, labor minister, answers questions from reporters about measures to prevent death from overwork on May 25. (Koichi Ueda)

The central government is about to ramp up pressure on ministries, agencies and local governments to stop placing business orders for quick turnaround projects with strict deadlines to help curb deaths from overwork.

The government included the call against issuing tight work-order deadlines in the final draft update to its policy outline for preventing deaths and injuries from overwork on May 25.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has been working on draft proposals for updating the outline, which was first established in 2015 and undergoes review every three years.

The ministry is urging the public sector to overhaul its business practices as it becomes increasingly aware that public servants’ notoriously long work hours are also taking a toll on their private-sector counterparts.

According to a survey by the powerful business lobby Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), about 30 percent of respondents said they think contracts awarded by the public sector tend to lead to overwork among their employees.

The survey was conducted between April and June 2020, involving about 250 member companies that have done business with central or local governments.

One company said a public-sector client “asked on the late afternoon of a Friday to swiftly answer its inquiry.”

Another complained that its “employees were forced to bear the burden of fixing many ambiguous parts left in the requirements of a system ordered” by a public-sector customer.

One high-profile example of death from overwork in connection with a project commissioned by the central government is that of a 30-year-old system engineer with a Toshiba Corp. affiliate who killed himself in November 2019. He was involved in developing a system for the welfare ministry, and had put in more than 100 hours of overtime a month right before his death.

Labor authorities ruled in December that his suicide was work-related.

The ministry is investigating into whether it is liable for the way it had ordered the system.

The labor ministry will also spell out new measures for public servants to reduce work hours in the new outline.

A recent study of central government employees showed that a total of 6,500 put in overtime above the “karoshi line,” the threshold of an average 80 hours of overtime per month, over three months through February.

In addition, the ministry will raise its target for the number of companies to institute a system securing a certain minimum amount of rest time for workers to take between workdays.

Under the existing outline, the target was set at more than 10 percent of companies by 2020. But that figure will be raised to more than 15 percent by 2025.

Only 4.2 percent of businesses had done so as of January 2020.

The system was introduced in April 2019 to require businesses to take action.

The ministry will also bolster assistance to small and midsize companies, as their share of adopting the rest-time interval system is low.

(This article was written by Sawa Okabayashi and Hiroaki Kimura.)

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