It’s a leap year: ‘corporate warriors’ beware!

One additional day every four years doesn’t sound like much. But when that additional day falls on a Wednesday then it’s not just another 24 hours. It’s a life and death matter for one group of working people known as “corporate warriors”, or, if you like, workaholics.
It seems a pretty personal question to ask, but did you feel overworked last year, and the year before that? If your answer is yes, then perhaps you should answer a second, related question: did you figure out the reason why? Even so, did you feel - however remotely - that you faced some risk, and that something could suddenly go terribly wrong with your health?
These are the kinds of questions millions of working people across the world asked themselves last year, and millions more will be asking themselves now. The questions become particularly compelling given that these days people’s New Year resolutions hardly include a determination to work less and play more!
In society after society, all manner of fears (of poverty, career stagnation, social slippage) have given rise to the equally serious disease of overwork. Show me one executive who does not secretly groan under the pressure of work? A taxing combination of long days at the desk, hours upon hours in an aeroplane cabin, and long nights of sleep-substituting mental exertion – it’s all in a day’s work, the saying goes. It translates to working day shift and night shift within a given 24-hour span.
Research has established that the consequences of overwork – or so-called ‘corporate warrior’ lifestyle – are dire.
One such consequence is what the Japanese call karoshi – an ominous term that translates loosely as ‘death from overwork’. It takes the form of serious cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disorders, and, in Japan alone, has once been blamed for some 33 per cent of the approximately 35,000 deaths annually from these diseases in the 20-59 age group. Statistics telling a more gruesome story about the fate of unlucky workaholics is obviously available somewhere.
It must be noted that the problem of long working hours is entrenched in the Japanese corporate culture, and that studies of karoshi often do not target corporate executives as such, but rank-and-file employees. In this piece, I make no distinction between executives and rank-and-file employees: overwork is a crucial, cruel challenge across the divide. Indeed, experience shows that many executives (in the public, private, and non-profit sectors) are working themselves to death.
Strikingly, in Japan – as elsewhere – claiming a meaningful compensation for karoshi is never a straightforward matter. While in some cases, relatives of the deceased are sent from pillar to post in the bid to claim for (over)work-related untimely deaths, governments are often in a quandary as to how to legislate on matters of this nature. Thus, in many countries there exists a penumbra as to what deaths can or cannot be legally attributed to overwork, for purposes of filing a claim for compensation. This partly explains why, even though the problem of extreme working hours has been with us for over five decades, social activism around karoshi is a relatively recent phenomenon. (I’m guided here by a book by Mark D. West entitled Law in everyday Japan: sex, sumo, suicide, and statutes, published in 2005 by University of Chicago Press.)

The reader would notice that I have deliberately steered this discussion away from another Japanese term karo-jisatsu, which loosely translates as “suicide by overwork”. The reason is that few overworked people in Nigeria, South Africa, or anywhere else on the continent would gladly situate the issue of work-related stress, and even death, within the discourse of suicide.
If relatives find it difficult to claim compensations for deaths arising from overwork, what does that leave us with? Clearly everyone must apply some commonsense when it comes to “meeting those deadlines”, “making those five back-to-back overseas trips”, and ensuring that “the company retains its place in the front row”.
Only last month the world was thrown into a shock when, in what was clearly one of the most chilling public statements ever made about the death of a Head of State, the North Korean authorities announced that overwork and stress were to blame for the heart attack that suddenly killed their leader Kim Jong-il.
Yet, in the frenzy of global political grandstanding, world opinion over the death has been mostly about “who takes the reins now that the strongman is gone”, and “what are the security and political implications for the Korean peninsula, the West, and the world at large of a possible power vacuum in North Korea. There seems to be much less concern about the social lessons in the demise – especially for those working people who are, but detest the tag of, ‘corporate warrior’. It is even doubtful if the millions of North Koreans who wept openly in the streets and at work took notice of what pain overwork can inflict on a nation.
Yes, in 2012, many great things will happen – at work and outside work. For one thing, many will have the opportunity of re-enacting the birthday they last celebrated on February 29 four years ago. The doves will fly and ribbons will twirl.
But someone will be one step closer to a cerebrovascular and cardiovascular crisis – and it will all be related to overwork.
If the era of New Year resolutions weren’t dead, being sensible about work would be strongly recommended for 2012. It would be top of the list for every ‘corporate warrior’.