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Marquette Turner is one of 12 Australian companies, along with Qantas, IBM and Commonwealth Bank, that officially and publically recognize the right of equal opportunity in the workplace to extend to marriage equality.
By being part of the Australian Marriage Equality, we along with a handful of other upright Australian companies confirm that we grant full recognition to any marriage, regardless of race, colour, creed or sex, and employ and work with customers with such sightedness.
In doing so and recognizing that all people should be treated with dignity and respect, we invite you to take a moment to visit the site of AME without judgment or opinion cast.
Simon Turner
Ideas cost nothing, so here’s a few to hopefully give you a jolt into helping you find your niche:
Personal services. Can you save someone else time? Running errands for seniors, preparing someone’s tax returns or walking your neighbors’ dogs are examples of valuable services to offer.
Gardening and landscaping. Consider the growing garden trade. Homeowners who lack the time or desire to plant and prune still recognize the importance of curb appeal today. Landscape design, maintenance and retail gardening businesses are hot now. If you enjoy working in nice weather around nature, the field of horticulture covers a wide range of professional specialties. You can be an arborist, look after commercial greenhouses, and care for golf courses or large private estates. With a formal education, you’ll learn about jet stream patterns and their effect on which plants grow best in certain regions.
Outdoor recreation work. For some folks, there’s no separation between work and play. Such types are reluctant to punch a clock or limit themselves to an indoor office cubicle to earn their living. If you’re a wilderness buff, perhaps you’re ready to strike out on your own and take Mother Nature on as a business partner. Business ideas include kayaking/white-water rafting outfitter; guided mountain biking, photo trekking, backpacking, or rock climbing tour operator; or opportunities within the state park system.
Pet services. Could your business be going to the dogs? Upscale pet-related services and merchandise are bringing home the bacon–to the tune of $30 billion a year in the United States today, according to a recent research study from Unity Marketing. Pet foods, doggie daycare, shampoos and even “pet pampering” spas and hotels are just a few of the products and services that make up the industry. If you have a knack for dog handling, dog obedience is another hot extra-income generator.
Workplace design. You could be a creator of the workplace of the future. As industries evolve, tomorrow’s offices will entice us through hip, ergonomically correct furnishings, the use of color, and innovative lighting. The need for experts who can implement ergonomically correct conditions is rising. Areas of specialization include industrial workplaces, occupational safety, furniture design, computer hardware, human-computer interaction, product liability, consumer products and virtual environments.
Feng shui consulting. Interest in feng shui has risen in recent years as more people seek greater levels of satisfaction and productivity in their careers, businesses and lifestyles. This ancient art promotes spiritual and material well being by devising the best way to lay out your house or office. Certified experts are hired to do “readings” for both residential and commercial space. Consultants can charge between $235 and $1,000 for a two-hour consultation, depending on the size of a property. Some businesses will pay upwards of $25,000 for large-scale projects. Field certification costs upwards of $3,500 and includes class time, mentoring and field training.
Alternative health services. As our health-care system becomes more prevention-oriented, Americans are increasingly more accepting of alternative, holistic health, and wellness practices. Healing arts such as massage therapy, reflexology, acupuncture and yoga are in demand by private and corporate clientele. Food items or eateries offering organic edibles free of processed ingredients, preservatives and sugars are sought after by the health-conscious.
Grooming services. Thanks to the popularity of TV shoes such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, men are becoming more upfront about wanting to look and feel good about themselves. For these so-called metrosexuals, a new wave of relaxation havens specially designated for men are cropping up. Today’s hottest services include facial bronzing, stone massage, organic facials, reflexology and seaweed wraps.
Spiritual work. Spiritually minded people make humanity their life’s work. Today, there are plenty of creative job paths you can pursue if you feel inspiring others is your life mission. For example, religious craftspeople and artists (think of all the Judaic and Catholic supply shops, candleholders, jewelry charms, trinket boxes, decorative nativity art and collectibles there are); church camp/counselor/director; religious writers and authors (even for religious greeting cards); and spiritual retreat leaders. These last folks lead trips to destinations with biblical/historical significance.
Senior-focused services. Don’t forget the lucrative aging baby boomers. The fifty-plus population is an intelligent, active group. They need products, services and information providers to meet their entertainment, education and lifestyle needs. Today, there are senior-focused book authors; website developers; travel, insurance and real-estate companies; and computer-training firms reaping profits from the older Americans they serve.
Business writing and services. If your skill is putting it in writing, hire yourself out as a business plan writer. Too many businesses lose out on new contracts, funding or clients because they don’t know how to communicate their message on paper. Businesses today have a need for marketing, strategy, lobbying and proposal writing services. Also, the demand for freelance writers with specialties in grant writing, bio met, IT, economic development and general business is high. Project work includes requests for proposals (RFPs), corporate training guides, computer documentation, white papers, government licensing applications, legislative memos and executive bios. Fees typically start at $100 per hour, or between $30,000 and $60,000 a year.
Home design and services. These days, home is where the art is. Thanks to baby boomers with discretionary income and a nationwide “cocooning” trend, interior decorating and design services are in demand. From guesthouses to second homes, vacation retreats to master bathrooms, those cashing in on the thriving home-fixings craze include architects, interior designers, landscape architects and pool builders. Other jobs include project management professionals for furniture companies or corporate facilities, and designers of hotels, healthcare institutions, retirement communities and nursing homes.
Culinary services. By the same token, staying in is the new going out and people are entertaining in their homes more than ever. Dinner parties have made a big comeback. If you have culinary skills, you’re in demand. Aside from catering, you may decide to give one-on-one cooking lessons, help prepare menus or conduct demonstrations in your own home. For the many people trying to eat well, both for health and epicurean reasons, you can hire yourself out as a personal chef or nutritionist.
The new gender gap puts women in front of men, at least in school. So says Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize Winning economist:
Whatever the explanation for the remarkable shift in college attendance rates of men and women during the past 40 years, this shift is likely to have major implications for future changes in the gender gap in average earnings, the fraction of heads of business that are women, and other measures of gender differences in achievement.
Here are four other reasons why the glass ceiling is breaking:
Women adapt better to new situations. Do you want to hire somebody who can hit the ground running or not?
Women make better managers. For instance, women are more likely to delegate and more likely to reward people. And they’re getting better at doing what men traditionally have done well.
Women make better leaders. For instance, women are better able to lead businesses towards transformation.
Women invest more wisely. Several looks at stock investing says you’re better off with women investing the money.
Why keep us men around at all? We have complementary skills.
Simon Turner
Here’s some wisdom of Omar Periu, one of the world’s best known motivational speakers, here he gives ten ways that he keeps himself motivated which Marquette Turner recommends following:
- Condition your mind. Train yourself to think positive thoughts.
- Condition your body. It takes physical energy to take action.
- Avoid negative people. Don’t take anything that they say seriously.
- Always remain flexible. No plan should be cast in concrete.
- Act with a higher purpose. If it doesn’t serve your goal, it’s wasted effort.
- Take responsibility for your own results. Don’t credit luck, good or bad.
- Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. That’s how you grow and evolve.
- Don’t wait for perfection; do it now! Perfection’s the enemy of good enough.
- Be careful of what you eat. It takes physical energy to succeed.
- Hang around motivated people. The positive energy will rub off on you.
I know this stuff works from own my personal experience. After I came up with this list I began to read the list to myself at the beginning of each workday. For an entire week, I made a point of referring back to them every time I had a lull in my work schedule. By the end of the week, they were influencing my thinking so much that I felt like a new person.
Motivation is the ultimate root of success.
To be successful it is important to learn to physically relax.
Take time off each week. Only work five or six days per week, and then rest on day seven. Studies have shown you are more productive in the five or six days you work if you take one or two days off completely, rather than working seven days straight.
On your day off, don’t use the time to catch up on work. Simply relax, spend time with family, friends, watch television, exercise, do nothing that requires any mental effort on your part. Ensure you close down for at least one full day per week, you will benefit from it enormously.
Have you lost your sex drive? Maybe your job is to blame. The National Sleep Foundation in Washington, in a poll released this month, cites prolonged workdays—including time spent working from home—for causing employees to “fall asleep or feel sleepy at work, drive [while] drowsy and lose interest in sex.” The organization says people are working longer hours, including average workdays of 9.5 hours, topped with an additional 4.5 hours each week working at home. More than one-fourth (28 percent) say lack of sleep interferes with their daily activities.
Deprived of sleep, nearly 30 percent are nodding off on the job, while 36 percent say they have fallen into slumber behind the wheel of a car. More than one-quarter say they drive drowsy during the workday and 12 percent said they have been tardy to work due to lack of sleep. Nearly one in five employees “have sex less often or have lost interest in sex” because they are too sleepy.
For the most part, employees are muddling through. Nearly two-thirds are “very likely to just accept their sleepiness and keep going.” Another 32 percent fuel their bodies and brains with caffeinated beverages. More than half (54 percent) rely on the weekends to try to catch up on lost sleep.
The amusingly named Hillbilly PhD blog has a post on the five qualities of leadership:
Don’t let circumstances control your behavior
Be persistent
Assess yourself honestly and thoroughly
Learn from failure
Follow your purpose.
This is my condensation of his entries. As with all such lists, easy to say, harder to do — he cites leaders like Lincoln and Gandhi, people who stand out in history for a reason. For the full discussion of these, head to his site. He says he’ll focus on these characteristics for some time to come.
I started working from home 2 years ago, and for the first year, I was pretty much useless. I’d end up watching TV or sleeping or playing with the dogs when I should have been typing, and I’d end up working when I should have been hanging out with my family.
I’d always be getting tempting calls during the workday from friends playing hooky from the office and wanting to go to the park.
I still get some of those calls, but the rest of the distractions are gone. Mainly, it was from following this suggestion from Dumb Little Man and laying down the law:
Since you are now working from home, everyone will expect you to be flexible and available when they need you. Friends may call during business hours, your children may expect you to drive them to a friend’s party, your spouse may expect you to run to the grocery store, and your aunts and uncles may feel that they can call upon you at any time of the day.
Setting expectations of family and friends is extremely important to ensure the smooth running of your home-based business. It is critical they understand that even though you have started working from home, the efforts involved in making it a success are by no means meager or guaranteed. The more serious you are about setting the rules about timings, the faster your friends and family will understand and internalize that you mean business.
Much is made of using body language to project strength and competence in the workplace, but as any FBI profiler will tell you, nonverbal cues are an indicator of larger underlying truths that shouldn’t be swept under the rug.
Given our sometimes brief workplace interactions, nonverbal communication plays very large role in our communications.
Meetings, presentations and hallway encounters offer precious little time to present yourself, but trying to mask your deficiencies with hand gestures, eye contact or a well-timed touch on the arm is like taking Panadol not bothering to think about the reason behind your pain. Plus, you also risk coming off as inauthentic. Here are some things to look out for:
Poor eye contact: Wandering eyes suggest you may have something to hide. If you have trouble being forthright with a teammate or manager, you have to ask, “Am I representing myself honestly, or is this job a stretch for me?” (Either in terms of qualifications or interest.)
Not smiling: When you aren’t smiling very often, there’s a good chance that you aren’t at ease. Do you have enough passion for the job you are doing that you feel a connection with your coworkers? Is your manager making any effort to make you comfortable? What might that say about your working relationship?
Slouching: When people are excited to meet someone or to make their point, they generally stand or sit up straight or even lean forward. If you regularly aren’t energetic or confident when in a meeting or presentation, you should be wondering, “Have I chosen a job that is something that I’m excited to get up and do most days? Is this person (or company) for whom I’m working someone I really respect?”
Feel like time is your adversary rather than your ally? Maybe you need to get a little better at managing the sucker. Dumb Little Man offers 11 tips for improving time-management, including these little gems:
1) Concentrate on One Thing: The human mind works more efficiently when it is focused. As we’ve seen before multitasking is actually a disadvantage to productivity. Focus on one thing and get it done. Take care not to bleed tasks into each other. At times, multitasking may seem like a more efficient route, but it is probably not.
2) Avoid Procrastination at All Costs: When trying to be more productive and trying to save time, procrastination should be avoided like nothing else. It is the ultimate productivity-killer.
3) Set Personal Deadlines: Nobody likes deadlines. They cause stress, aggravation, worry, and, more stress. A guaranteed way to alleviate some of this stress is to set your own earlier deadlines. Be realistic but demanding of yourself. Challenge yourself and reward yourself for a meeting a difficult challenge.
What methods do you use to manage your time? I’m still a fan of the “to-do list”. I make a list of three or four things I must get done each day. It doesn’t seem overwhelming, and I get great satisfaction from crossing them off.
If you haven’t been involved in one, I’m sure you’ve witnessed a heated conversation between work colleagues in which potentially beneficial discussion gets lost in the tension.
A colleague of mine, Donald Jessep from Profitableteams.com, was describing a heated exchange between Mike, a Financial Controller, and Steve, a Sales Manager. Mike suggested they close one of the company’s branches.
“You can’t do that” was Steve’s retort to Mike’s suggestion. Mike fired back a dirty look and the blood pressure of both men clicked up a notch. Mike’s enthusiasm evaporated and what could have been an idea worth discussing went no further.
If Steve had exercised discipline in applying the three steps of an age-old process there would have been a different outcome to the discussion.
Step 1 — Acknowledge the person. Even if you don’t agree with the comment. Acknowledgment can be a smile or the gift of undivided attention.
Step 2 — Give a reason to explore another angle. The reason has to be plausible, even encouraging to the person who proposed the idea … and free of all judgment.
Step 3 — Ask a question, a high-quality question. A high-quality question demands just the right amount of mental stretch to answer.
They’re simple ideas, but sadly, especially once we become familiar with people we sometimes lack the awareness and discipline to apply them. Highly influential people have this process deeply ingrained and can apply it even under pressure
You already have everything you need to create a wonderful life for yourself. You know everything you need to know to be your own best friend, a gentle guide, a teacher and a helper to yourself so you can be truly happy and fulfilled. You can learn how to become your own psychotherapist for life, and how to resolve the difficulties that stand between you and personal joy.
Be Honest With Yourself
The starting point of becoming your own best friend is for you to be perfectly honest with yourself and your relationships. Refuse to practice self-delusion or hope for the best. For example, when something is making you unhappy, for any reason, the situation will tend to get worse rather than better. So avoid the temptation to engage in denial, to pretend that nothing is wrong, to wish and hope and pray that, whatever it is, it will go away and you won’t have to do anything. The fact is that it probably will get worse before it gets better and that ultimately you will need to face the situation and do something about it.
Deal With Your Problem at a Higher Level
There’s an old saying that you can’t solve a problem on the level that you meet it. This means that wrestling with a persistent problem is often fruitless and frustrating. For example, if two people who are in a relationship together are constantly fighting and negotiating and looking for some way to resolve their difficulties, they may be attempting to solve the problem on the wrong level. Dealing with the problem on a higher level, those people would ask the question, “In terms of being happy, is this the right relationship for us in the first place?”
Find the Right Job For You
Many people work very hard and experience considerable frustration trying to do a particular job. However, in terms of their own happiness, the right answer might be to do something else, or to do what they’re doing in a different place, or to do it with different people-or all three.
Here are a few questions for you to answer in this arena of happiness. Write them down at the top of a sheet of paper, and then write as many answers to each one as you possibly can.
What Would It Take?
The first question is: “What would it take for me to be perfectly happy?”
Write down every single thing that you can imagine would be in your life if you were perfectly happy at this very moment. Write down things such as health, happiness, prosperity, loving relationships, inner peace, travel, car, clothes, homes, money, and so on. Let your mind run freely. Imagine that you have no limitations at all.
What is Holding You Back?
The second question is a little tougher. Write down at the top of a page this question: “In what situations in my life, and with whom, am I not perfectly happy?” Force yourself to think about every part of your day, from morning to night, and write down every element that makes you unhappy or dissatisfied in any way. Remember, proper diagnosis is half the cure. Identifying the unsatisfactory situations is the first step to resolving them.
Determine Your Happiest Moment
The third question will give you some important guidelines. Write down at the top of a sheet of paper these words: “In looking over my life, where and when have I been the happiest? Where was I, with whom was I, and what was I doing?”Decide What to DoOnce you have the answers to those questions, think about what you can do, starting immediately, to begin creating the kind of life that you dream of. It may take you a week, a month, or a year, but that doesn’t matter.
Every single thing you do that moves you closer to your ideal vision will be rewarding in itself. You’ll become a more positive and optimistic person. You’ll feel more confident and more in charge of your life, and you’ll achieve true peace of mind.
Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, examine your business and personal relationships carefully. Is there any situation you wouldn’t get into again if you had it to do over?
Second, make a list of every single thing in your life that would make you happy and then think about what you could do to begin achieving them.
Third, allow yourself to dream and fantasize about your ideal life, what it would look like and feel like, and then do something every day to make it a reality.
Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today. His fast-moving talks and seminars on leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that people can immediately apply to get better results in every area. For more information, please go to www.briantracy.com
Companies are having a tough time persuading their senior managers to take advantage of online training. According to studies, 90% of managers have Internet access, but most don’t find the time to participate in e-learning or other Internet-based training.
About 67% say they spent 30 minutes or less last year using intranets or e-learning to solve business issues. Slightly more than half (54%) have capitalised on available online management resources.
Time constraints and lack of engagement are stumbling blocks. 46% say they have “too many distractions” to use computer-based learning, while 20% claim the learning content “fails to engage them.” The conclusions were drawn from responses of nearly 1,000 managers.
In a separate survey, however, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. reports that executives see the value of advanced Internet technologies that promote self-paced learning and collaboration.
These tools include items such as peer-to-peer networking, blogs, podcasts and social networking. According to McKinsey, half of the 2,847 executives surveyed “are pleased with the results of their investments in Internet technologies” made during the past five years. Three-quarters of companies plan to either increase or at least maintain their investments in so-called Web 2.0 technologies.
Staffing firm Robert Half International is throwing cold water on the widely held perception that Generation Y workers have different concerns and wants from those of older workers.
According to research by Half and Yahoo HotJobs, younger employees “share many of the same concerns as more tenured workers when it comes to saving for retirement, finding a solid health care plan and achieving work/life balance.”
Where the divide apparently surfaces is in what these newcomers expect from company leaders. In fact, they rated “working with a boss they respect and can learn from as the most important aspect of their work environment, ahead of having a nice office space, a short commute or working for a socially responsible company.”
About 60 percent of Gen Y’ers also expect to have meaningful interaction with their managers “at least once a day.”
A study at Stanford Business School examined the qualities that companies look for in promoting young managers toward senior executive positions, particularly the position of Chief Executive Officer.
The study concluded that the two most important qualities required for great success were, first, the ability to put together and function as part of a team. Since all work is ultimately done by teams, and the managers’ output is the output of the team, the ability to select team members, set objectives, delegate responsibility and finally, get the job done, was central to success in management.
The second quality was found to be the ability to function well under pressure, especially in a crisis. Keeping your cool in a crisis means to practice patience and self-control under difficult or disappointing circumstances.
Mental illness takes a bigger toll on business than physical woes, and disability absences are twice as long when triggered by depression.
If your bottom line has you feeling blue, don’t let that feeling get out of hand, or the bottom line could really suffer.
That’s because while workers with behavioral health problems—a phrase that encompasses substance abuse and mental health problems—are a small percentage of the overall workforce, they are responsible for a large percentage of overall health expenditures.
Marquette Turner has found studies in the US that indicate, for example, that roughly 6 percent of the U.S. workforce is depressed at any given time. But according to Sibson Consulting in Chicago, behavioral health issues cause 217 million missed workdays annually, account for 7.6 percent of total health care dollars, and are the fifth leading cause of short-term disability and, ultimately, the third leading cause of long-term disability.
Studies also show that 29 percent of health- and productivity-related expenditures are a result of employee absence and disability caused by physical health problems, while 47 percent are caused by mental health conditions.
Lost productivity from behavioral health problems can be staggering. For example, a 2006 Aetna analysis of claims found that disability absences doubled in length when the cause was depression. In a study of employers—including large private employers and governmental entities—OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions found that the average annual cost of lost productivity due to depression was $5 million per company.
Just letting employees know what benefits exist and encouraging them to utilize them is a good strategy. Firms should also analyze who is prescribing antidepressants and encourage employees to go to mental health professionals instead of general practitioners, Donahue says.
Antidepressants are often prescribed by general practitioners, but studies show that a combination of medicine and psychiatric therapy is the most effective treatment. Going to a mental health professional and getting therapy along with medication is more likely to result in better treatment, she says.
Employees who are depressed have higher medical utilization rates, so medical plan costs are higher. Depression becomes the costliest behavioral health-related issue for employers because when the high prevalence of depression among employees is factored together with medical, pharmaceutical and workplace productivity costs, the total cost to the employer is huge.
Employers should have a systematic program for treating depression. Training managers and organizational leaders to identify depression is also critical because workers may not recognize that they are depressed, she says.
EVERYONE loves a bargain. But retailers know that people will sometimes turn their noses up at a cheap version of a more expensive item, even if the two are essentially the same.
That suggests something is at work in the mind of the consumer beyond simple appreciation of a product’s intrinsic qualities.
The something in question is expectation, according to research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Antonio Rangel of the California Institute of Technology and reported by The Economist. Dr Rangel and his colleagues found that if people are told a wine is expensive while they are drinking it, they really do think it tastes nicer than a cheap one, rather than merely saying that they do.
Dr Rangel came to this conclusion by scanning the brains of 20 volunteers while giving them sips of wine. He used a trick called functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which can detect changes in the blood flow in parts of the brain that correspond to increased mental activity. He looked in particular at the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. This is an area of the brain that previous experiments have shown is responsible for registering pleasant experiences.
Dr Rangel gave his volunteers sips of what he said were five different wines made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, priced at between $5 and $90 a bottle. He told each of them the price of the wine in question as he did so. Except, of course, that he was fibbing. He actually used only three wines. He served up two of them twice at different prices.
What is truth?
The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. For example, when one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. Moreover, when the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.
Nor was the effect confined to everyday drinkers. When Dr Rangel repeated the experiment on members of the Stanford University wine club he got similar results. All of which raises the question of what is going on.
There are at least two possibilities. The point of learning is to improve an individual’s chances of surviving and reproducing: if the experience and opinions of others can be harnessed to that end, so much the better. Dr Rangel suspects that what he has found is a mechanism for learning quickly what has helped others in the past, and thus for allowing choices about what is nice and what is nasty to be made speedily and efficiently. In modern society, price is probably a good proxy for such collective wisdom.
However, goods can be desirable for a reason other than survival value. Many of the things for which high price is an enhancement are purchased in order to show off, as any male confronted with the wine list in a fancy restaurant knows. Indeed, conspicuous consumption and waste are an important part of social display. Deployed properly, they bring the rewards of status and better mating opportunities. For this to work, though, it helps if the displaying individual really believes that what he is buying is not only more expensive than the alternative, but better, too. Truly enjoying something simply because it is exclusive thus makes evolutionary sense.
Besides its role in giving cachet to wine, this may be the explanation for the sort of modern art that leaves the man in the street cold. Art collecting is a high-status activity par excellence. Many lowlier mortals regard it as pretentious. If Dr Rangel is right, though, pretence may not be the true explanation. The collector who has paid millions for a plain-coloured canvas or a pickled sheep probably really does think it is beautiful.
Whichever explanation is correct (and both might be), Dr Rangel’s research also has implications for retailers, marketing firms and luxury-goods producers. It suggests that a successful marketing campaign can not only make people more interested in a product, but also, truly, make them enjoy it more.
Karōshi (過労死), which can be translated quite literally from Japanese as “death from overwork”, is occupational sudden death. The major medical causes of karōshi deaths are heart attack and stroke due to stress.
The first case of karōshi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old male worker in the shipping department of Japan’s largest newspaper company. It was not until the latter part of the 1980s, during the Bubble Economy, however, when several high-ranking business executives who were still in their prime years suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, that the media began picking up on what appeared to be a new phenomenon.
This new phenomenon was quickly labeled karōshi and was immediately seen as a new and serious menace for people in the work force. In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on karōshi.
Usually, Japan’s rise from the devastation of World War II to economic prominence in the post-war decades has been regarded as the trigger for what has been called a new epidemic. It was recognized that employees cannot work for up to twelve or more hours a day, six or seven days a week, year after year, without suffering physically as well as mentally.
A recent measurement found that a Japanese worker has approximately two hours overtime a day on average. In almost all cases, the overtime is unpaid. The recent international expansion of Japanese multinationals has also led to an export of the Karōshi culture to countries such as China, Korea and Taiwan.
Meanwhile, death-by-overwork lawsuits have been on the rise in Japan, with the deceased person’s relatives demanding compensation payments. However, before compensation can be awarded, the labour inspection office must acknowledge that the death was work-related. As this may take many years in detailed and time-consuming judicial hearings, many do not demand payment.
Japanese courts have even awarded damages to relatives in cases of work overload induced stress or depression ending with the suicide of the employee when the Labour Standards Inspection Office rejected the plea for compensation. The practice of “voluntary” undocumented unpaid overtime (sabisu-zangyo) is also reported as leading to karōshi incidents.
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour published relevant statistics in 2007: about 355 workers fell severely ill or died from overwork in the year to March, the highest figure on record and 7.6 percent up from the previous year. Of the total, 147 people died, many from strokes or heart attacks. Separately, another 819 workers contended they became mentally ill due to overwork, with 205 cases given compensation, according to the ministry data released on Wednesday. Mentally troubled workers killed themselves or attempted to do so in 176 cases.
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