Photo/Illutration Lawyers hold a news conference on April 3 at the labor ministry in Tokyo, discussing their client who was certified as having developed a mental illness due to overwork while working from home. (Junichi Miyagawa)

In a precedent-setting case, the labor authorities in Yokohama determined that a woman developed a mental illness due to excessive overwork while working from home for a medical device maker.

“This is a landmark decision by the authorities to recognize that remote overwork caused a work-related illness,” said Yusuke Kasagi, a lawyer representing the woman, who is in her 50s.

He made the remark on April 3 in a news conference held at the labor ministry in Tokyo. 

The woman joined the accounting and human resources team of Starkey Japan Co., a Yokohama-based hearing aid manufacturer, in 2019.

She started working from home around 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her overtime hours increased from around the end of 2021 and she developed an adjustment disorder in March 2022, according to her lawyers.

On March 8, the Yokohama Kita Labor Standards Inspection Office certified her condition as a work-related mental illness based on her overtime exceeding 100 hours per month for the two months before the onset of the illness.

The woman worked under a fixed-pay system typically applied to employees with flexible schedules or those who work outside of typical office hours.

When the system is applied to remote workers, labor ministry guidelines require that they are not under constant supervision by their superiors.

Additionally, workers are not obligated to respond immediately to instructions from supervisors via communication devices.

However, the woman was in a situation where she could not leave her computer because she received instructions from her superior several times an hour.

The labor authorities judged that the application of the system was illegal in this case.

Working from home has become common due to the COVID-19 pandemic. More than half of the companies in Japan offered remote work options in 2021, compared to about 20 percent in pre-pandemic 2019, according to an internal affairs ministry survey.

“The decision underscores the need for companies to properly track remote workers’ working hours,” said Yuta Arima, another lawyer representing the woman.

Arima added that some companies irresponsibly make employees work from home without proper work hour management.

“We are taking the decision seriously,” said Starkey Japan. “We are negotiating with the employee in question and will respond sincerely.”

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