日本为强制“加班族”休假而创建全国性假日_BEC初级作文

日本为强制“加班族”休假而创建全国性假日

“When you have a longer working day, at some point because you’re becoming tired, it decreases your productivity,” French economist Renaud Bourlès told BusinessWeek.

Nonetheless, mandatory vacation days may not be a perfect solution. The Diplomat notes that mandatory holidays can create headaches for a workforce all taking the day off together. In theory, when employees voluntarily choose their vacation days the dip in the workforce is more evenly distributed over the year. But when everyone is taking the same national holidays cities are left with congested roads and overbooked flights during what is meant as a window of relaxation.

In the US 77 percent of all private companies offer paid vacation and holidays although federal law does not require them to do so. That’s still better than Japan, where most workers are not paid for their mandatory holiday days off.

The concept of being overworked is so prevalent in Japan that the country has its own word for people who die of heart attacks and other ailments directly attributed to excessive labor – Karoshi. The word literally translates to mean “death from over work.”

In recent years, Karoshi has broadened its meaning to include Japanese “salarymen” who commit suicide as a result of the emotional distress from working too much and under uncertain conditions. A 2017 Pulitzer Center investigation outlined a scenario that might sound unsettlingly familiar to many American workers: