Labor & Employment
Japan Court Orders Comp for Worker Who Died From Overwork
A Japanese court has ordered the government to pay benefits to the widow of a Toyota employee because he died from overwork.
The court found that Kenichi Uchino had worked about 106 hours of overtime in the month before he died, the Economic Times reports. Uchino’s wife, Hiroku, had argued the extra work caused him to develop an abnormal heart rhythm.
Uchino was a Toyota middle manager who died in 2002 at the age of 30, the Associated Press reports.
In Uchino’s case the Labor Ministry had ruled his death was not caused by overwork. But the government did acknowledge 147 cases of death from overwork—known as karoshi—out of 303 applications in the year ending in March 2007.
