The October 23, 2017 issue of Time Magazine taught me, and I suspect many others, a Japanese word. Karoshi – Death by Overwork. It goes on to say that roughly 10,000 Japanese citizens die each year from Karoshi. The business culture there expects, no, demands, employees work well over 40 hours per week yet never record more than 40 hours. The real stat was that 1 in 4 companies admitted they have employees routinely putting in 80 hours of overtime per month.
Where I find the journalism failed is the fact they didn’t follow up on American companies doing the same thing. Walmart has been convicted more than once of forcing hourly employees to work off the clock. Bloomberg is notorious for bringing in hourly IT contractors then claiming they only pay based on a “professional day” and Bloomberg is the sole designator of what is a “professional day’s” worth of work.
The practice of forcing employees to work long unpaid hours has been rampant in American business for more than a decade. I would not be surprised to hear that someone paid the Gartner Group to promote the “Do more with less” mantra you’ve all heard. This, even though many/most business strategists and analysts have documented it to be a false methodology.
While I have not personally heard of anyone working so many hours at Walmart they died, I can relate a true story which happened at a former client site.
Big publicly traded company brought in several big name management consulting businesses and some outsourcing/off-shoring businesses to try and cut their IT technology costs. One of the management consulting teams told them to not even waste the energy on looking to outsource because they were already paying their IT staff well below market and had too few to do the job. Said management consulting group was then removed from the out-sourcing/off-shoring project team. Incompetent management never wants to hear that it is and has perpetually been incompetent.
There were lots of things outsourced and off-shored. One project was some big new system and it was given to a massively well known technology company. It was fixed bid with a clause that Big Publicly Traded Companies employees would be tasked with assisting with all proprietary business and technology portions, or some such wording like that. (Refer to the line above about the competency level of management.)
Anyone who has ever done anything in IT knows you never ever put a clause like that in any contract. Doing so means you are paying the other company to horsewhip your employees. The more work they off-load to your people, the more money they make.
The already too few and quite overworked employees started putting off requests from Massively Well Known technology company because their projects also had delivery dates which weren’t being pushed back and there weren’t enough hours allocated for them to begin with. (Do more with less management simply cut the hour estimate and told them to deliver in that time frame.) Adding insult to injury, one employee who had a finger in many projects was out for an extended period of time, recovering from multiple bypass surgery. I believe it was all four majors around the heart, but, it’s been a while and not really important. When employees are already working overtime and one who does not smoke has to have bypass surgery, that’s a red flag.
Shortly after bypass surgery employee returned to work, Massively Well Known technology company began screaming about the lack of support/response they were getting from Big Publicly Traded Company’s employees. Rumors abounded about escape clauses, doubling cost of contract, blah blah blah. Management, looking to cut costs further, sent around an email/memo/instruction to all of their overworked IT people involved in the outsourced project (just how outsourced could it be?) that they would work all required hours to support Massively Well Known technology company’s project.
Multiple bypass employee who didn’t smoke was a massive Chicago Bears fan. Even when they completely sucked he rooted for them. He was included in Massively Well Known technology company’s outsourced project and said email/memo/instruction. I don’t remember if it was Saturday evening or Sunday morning. I just know that he died before he got to see one final Bears game.
This is not the first person in my 30+ year IT career who was ridden into the grave by a job and/or worthless management. It was just the most memorable and the one I was closest to, having worked with the guy for several years. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t mortal enemies either. Time Magazine should be reporting on these stories and not treating this as a foreign country phenomenon.
IT is full of these stories. You can rent a copy of “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” if you want to see the “90 Hours Per Week and Loving It!” T-shirts for Apple Pirates. While some contest the truth to that quoting other Apple employees, Pirates were different. They had their own building and culture.
Heck, I remember the story years ago here in Illinois of the project manager whose mega well known pharmacy chain had announced to the world their new AS/400 based pharmacy system would be the first to link every store so you could get your refill anywhere in the world. The live date had been announced in advertising and the project was massively behind. The story says the manager went into the office on Sunday morning (nothing knew there) sat down at his desk and blew his brains out. The whispers in the IT world said a police investigation for a suicide was the only way to get his team more time.
One client I worked for had to ship the body of an IT worker back from a foreign country. (This happened before I started but it was still all of the chatter.) They had been working so many hours setting up that system she literally died at her desk. Then they found out just how few airlines (at least in the 1980s) would transport a body for money. They don’t mind a cabin full of sick people sharing air, but, a dead body in the cargo hold makes them squeamish.
Time Magazine should be covering Karoshi in America because it is prevalent at any company whose management utters the phrase “Do more with less.”
