CEO resigns after overworked employee commits suicide

[Psihala]

The head of the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu has resigned after the suicide of a junior employee was linked to a company culture that required staffers to work huge amounts of overtime.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/29/news...tsu/index.html

[Rebochan]

Knowing people that have held down jobs in Japan, overwork and excessive overtime is practically built in to their current work culture. I'm surprised it took this long for a suicide to happen. I suspect this wasn't the first at all, but the first that drew enough attention to make regulators do something about it.

[ganzfeld]

I don't think that is a first either. There were full books written about all these subjects - overwork, suicide from overwork, and regulations to prevent it - way back in the 1980's.

[crocoduck_hunter]

The article did mention that it's frequent enough that there's even a word for it: karoshi.

[ganzfeld]

That's a non sequitur. The word has been around for a long time. It's existence doesn't tell us anything about how prevalent the problem is. English also has the term "worked to death" for more than a hundred years. So?

[crocoduck_hunter]

So if there's a term for the event it's obviously something that has happened before. It doesn't mean that it's a daily occurrence but it's something that people are apparently aware of as happening before this event.