About a week ago I saw this article on the BBC website. Apparently one in nine Britons work a 48 hour week. I showed the title of the article around the office and everyone marveled: What a benevolent country Britain must be to only insist on its workers working for 48 hours. Here’s why they missed the point:
Perhaps too easy a target, but the Japanese work like crazy. In the schools I work, teachers usually work at least twelve hours a day. The office workers work at least that much too. I went to work the other day, mildly irritated to find myself locked out of the Saturday morning meeting (starts 8 a.m. people!) because no one had yet arrived to open up at five to eight. Only later did I find out they had been working until four that morning preparing for an important school event. Then they went home, were back at eight, and worked another 15 hours on the Saturday. Amazing.
This extreme effort is made possible through the group-mentality instilled Japanese people from school age. The group is more important than the individual. The group’s needs take precedence over those of the individual. The success of the group is more important than that of the individual. And your status as a member of the group is to be closely guarded: No-one wants the ultimate shame of being nakaba-hazure, or outside of the group.
So you will find people actually unwilling to go home when they finish their work, if colleagues are still working. They will stay as moral support. They will stay until their whole group has finished. Of course this does have good points, you can build a strong team-ethic if everyone works in this way. However, this can also be abused by a company. Because if by going home early, a person is seen to be insensitive to the needs of the group, then people will stay to save face while actually being unwilling to stay at work. It is the ultimate peer pressure. So if people are staying later, they can be made to do more work in the time they wait for the other members of the group, and it becomes a vicious circle of lateness. All you need is one masochistically hardworking member of each group, and EVERYONE will work as late as they do.
So, despite being contracted for 40 hours of work, people often put in double. The law theoretically enforces overtime payments and a number of maximum hours worked: However, time sheets are regularly falsified (with the full knowledge of staff and management) to show that only 40 hours were worked, remaining hours shown on computer log-in systems as “Other” for which of course there is no requirement to pay for. My company demands, and provides systems in order for, employees changing their worked hours to no more than 40 each week, regardless of hours actually worked. And people don’t complain! Why not? Because that would be to put your own feelings over those of the group – and you don’t want to be nakaba hazure!
Posted by mostlyrawfish 