TOKYO: Japan

TOKYO: Japan has launched its first national company blacklist, naming-and-shaming more than 300 businesses for breaching labour legal guidelines, as Tokyo ramps up efforts to tackle notoriously lengthy paintings hours blamed for “karoshi”, or death from overwork.

The labour ministry’s listing, which become launched this week, called out masses of corporations, including marketing giant Dentsu and an arm of Panasonic, for illegal extra time and other place of business violations.

The pinnacle govt at Dentsu stop late last year in reaction to the suicide of a younger employee who regularly logged extra than one hundred hours of overtime a month. The dying of Matsuri Takahashi generated nationwide headlines, prompting the authorities to give you a option to punishing paintings hours blamed for masses of deaths due to strokes, coronary heart assaults and suicides every 12 months.

Many firms at the labour ministry list — a compilation of publicly to be had data — are construction firms accused of protection infractions, along with having personnel paintings with out proper protection or letting them operate heavy equipment with out being licensed to achieve this.

It become unclear what effect the strategy might have on firms’ behaviour. And the listing named fewer than a dozen companies in the capital Tokyo for breaching labour laws between October and April.

This 12 months, a panel headed with the aid of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came up with a plan calling on employers to limit overtime to a maximum of a hundred hours in step with month, which critics slammed as still too high.

Currently, Japanese corporations could make full-time personnel paintings a ways past the standard forty hours a week during busy intervals.

Overtime is viewed as a signal of dedication at many firms, even if Japanese people’ productiveness lags at the back of that of their US and European counterparts.

And a couple of in five Japanese businesses have employees whose tendency to overwork places them at severe risk of loss of life, in keeping with a government survey posted in October. The 2d “Voyage of the Balangay” sailed off from Maimbong, Jolo to Zamboanga on Wednesday to begin a 24-day journey to China the use of newly constructed balangay boats.

Boat builders from the Sama Dilaya tribe of Sibutu and Sitangkai built the boats, replicas of the historical balangay, in Tawi-tawi.

The boats are crafted from hardwood and are of the identical structure as the ones utilized in 2009-2011 by means of the group of Environment Undersecretary Art Valdez after they sailed round Southeast Asian international locations. That first adventure took a complete of 17 months and taken the sea travelers from Tawi-tawi to Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and the territorial waters of Vietnam. China become part of the itinerary of the primary balangay voyage however the all-Filipino team determined to spend Christmas in the Philippines after being far from home for an prolonged time period.