Karoshi: The new killer

Many ambitious employers woke up startled to a recent news that a young otherwise healthy Japanese woman in her 30s had died suddenly due to overwork. Indeed she had worked 159 hours of overtime in the previous week and had taken only 2 days off in the last 2 months!

And now, it is not just the Japanese but Chinese and Indians as well who are dying at early age from this new disease — overwork. Since the Japanese were the first to recognise it they named it “Karoshi”. The Chinese have been quick to follow, noting a whopping 6,00,000 young lives lost annually to it and called it “gualaosi”.

Overwork kills, not just people engaged in hard physical labour such as farm labour or rickshaw pullers struggling under inclement weather, as we have known, but young white and blue collared office goers in fast paced metros in the country.

Karoshi is somewhat different from the common scenario of an executive with diabetes, blood pressure and heart disease, slumping to death in his office chair or car park. It is understandable that stress of work can cause heart attacks and strokes in those who have a medical predisposing condition.

In the k-syndrome, the victim is usually a young healthy person in his twenties or thirties, who has been doing more than 100 hours of overtime a week, who suddenly dies from “exhaustion”, due to lack of a better jargon-sounding medical term.

One of the first reported cases was of a young Japanese who was working 15 hour days and a 4 hour gruelling commute. In another case a 24 year old Japanese girl literally jumped to her death after working 100 hours of overtime a month.

Is this a Japanese-Chinese-Asian phenomenon or does it really have to do with the physical consequences of overwork?

After the 2nd World War, when Japan started rebuilding itself, almost from a scratch, the circumstances and Japanese culture encouraged hard work. More hard work meant more money, more social standing, and perhaps more importantly, more selfworth, making many WORKAHOLICS. Soon young people were working very long hours, sleeping less and charging themselves with targets to achieve.

It is now recognised that 20%, or one in every 5 of young Japanese workers are working far too longer and harder and putting themselves at risk of Karoshi. The government has therefore promulgated laws to ensure that employers change their work culture and /or are charged with heavy compensation if their employees come to harm from overwork.

What causes the death remains somewhat unclear. Some blame sleep deprivation, while others point to stress and cardiac events.

And when I see young Indians in metro cities slogging endlessly at office day and night, in keeping with the time lines of their Western counterparts, without sleep, holidays and fun, I am convinced that Karoshi is occurring here as well. We are yet to give it an Indian name!