Remember when you were a kid, and didn’t want to do something, and your mom said ‘a little broccoli/making the bed/math homework never killed anybody?’ Well, sometimes work can kill you, as any of you who read this site can easily attest. The Japanese, who have a word for everything, have a word for “death by overwork.” This word is karoshi and was officially coined in 1987, when the Japanese government acknowledged overwork of employees as a potential cause of death.
The most recent person to die by karoshi was a senior car engineer at Toyota. The man, whose name has not been released, was working on a new hybrid Camry model. The man’s wife’s lawyers said that ”in the two months leading up to his death, the man averaged more than 80 hours of overtime per month.”
A legal declaration that the Toyota employee died of karoshi means that his widow and family are entitled to government benefits. Personally, I’m torn between wanting the US government to acknowledge similar deaths here in the States and just hoping the revival of karoshi coverage in the media causes nations around the world to slash their work weeks and reconfigure the workplace.
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