Working Ourselves to Death
December 14th, 2007 by Cali & Jody
There is a very sad story that’s been going around about a Toyota worker who died–on the job, at 4 am–of overwork. As this version notes, he had put in 106 hours of overtime the month he died.
The Japanese word for what happened to Mr. Uchino is karoshi. Karoshi first surfaced as a phenomenon in the 1980s and the media takes it semi-seriously. A worker’s death is not taken lightly, but the idea of death from overwork often comes off as an oddity, an extreme consequence of the (sometimes) extreme work culture found in corporate Japan.
We say that while the outcome is extreme, the fundamental forces behind karoshi are not unique to Japan, nor are they to be taken lightly. People die at work in Japan because of stress. Even if stress isn’t literally killing us in the rest of the world, we would be foolish to think that the stress of playing the game of work doesn’t take its toll.
The American Institute of Stress has a nice page on the economic and social effects of job stress. The AIS nicely expresses the human and business costs of stress, but we’re not waiting for the right number to come along and tell us that work is broken. And we’re also not going to wait for work to start killing people. A Results-Only Work Environment means that people don’t have to tolerate harmful work stress. There is an alternative and the time has come for people to use it.
