Many Japanese companies have imposed on overtime work on employees, which is against the labor law, and working overtime was a virtue of Japanese employees.
However, these days, many young Japanese are refusing the overtime work.
Denying the overtime work imposed by the companies can possibly cause disciplinary actions or dismissals. Nevertheless, it is still debatable whether denying the illegal overtime work can be a legal reason to be laid off.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/84a84e47dad44f097e0e1dc30386258edab5b687
6 Comments
Why denying the illegal overtime work can be a legal reason to be laid off ?
I mean in what world could you be fired to refuse illegal stuff ?
Yup, that is why there is a term for that, 社畜 – Shachiku, corporate slaves.
Why is this debatable? It’s clearly not a legal reason, just that the companies do it. What’s the debate?
What you gonna do fire them and hire foreigners? Lol
Read the article, what is written follows what the law says as far as I know and is not taking sides.
As a premise: your company can ask you to do over time based on the work conditions stipulated in your contract and the company rules, however there are legal limits to how many hours of overtime they can mandate.
The above is based both on the fact that you have signed a mutual contract with the company and that the company has the 命令権, basically the capacity to order the worker to do a certain job within the limits of the contract and the law.
Now, refusing to do overtime or not and by how much is a case-by-case story. If you leave your tasks unfinished and refuse to do overtime (like an example in the article) it can be debated if the company has legal bandwidth to take measures against you. I am against overtime, specially when it is unnecessary and based on peer pressure, but saying that an employee should just be able to unilaterally refuse overtime is too extreme imho.
Unionize, you have GOT to unionize people. Especially with Japan’s laws that generally favor unions more than many countries.