A Japanese court has ordered a restaurant chain and two personnel to pay more than half a million dollars damages to the family of a man who killed himself after being forced to work nearly 200 hours overtime a month.
Tokyo District Court said the president of Tokyo-based Sun Challenge, a steak house chain, and another official had been culpable in failing to stop the unidentified employee from working excessive hours.
"With only one holiday given to him every several months, the psychological load of prolonged work and power harassment caused his mental disorder," said presiding judge Akira Yamada, according to a Kyodo News report on Tuesday.
Yamada ordered the company and its two officials to pay a total of 58 million yen ($510,000) to the parents of the man, who was 24 when he took his own life in November 2010.
The employee began working for Sun Challenge in 2007 and was appointed restaurant manager in July 2009.
In the seven months before he hanged himself, he had worked an average of 190 hours overtime every month and had taken just two days off.
He had also been subjected to physical violence and verbal attacks by his supervisor.
The ruling was "epoch-making", a lawyer for the man's parents told Kyodo, noting that unusually in a suicide claim, there had been no finding of comparable negligence on the part of the employee to offset the blame attached to the company.
Slave driving scum.
ReplyDeleteIn the United States it is quite the opposite as companies are allowed to take out secret life insurance policies on their employees so they, the employers, have a direct incentive to drive their employees to kill themselves, act irresponsibly, eat obesively, do drugs and drink alcohol.
ReplyDeleteYou see in America, it is the corporate profit interest to see our people struggle, fail and die. You'll never make the kind of instant profit off them living that you can make driving them to kill themselves.
Beasts of burden we will have to be...until the day they replace the vast majority of workers with robotics. In the interim, they will squeeze maximum mileage out of us.
ReplyDeleteSend the executives to a one month vacation to Fukushima.
ReplyDeleteAnd the Ds and the Rs in DC protect them!!
ReplyDeleteThen they will just kill us.
ReplyDelete