How COVID-19 is Erasing the Private Lives of the Japanese Salaryman
The Japanese language has a term サービス精神 ("the spirit of service") to denote anyone who has the mentality to be helpful to others, whether the others in question are clients, coworkers, or family members. The idea of being helpful to others is an essential part of the concept of "omotenashi," the idea of predicting and then following through with what others would find most pleasant and comfortable. In the world of business of retail, hospitality, and other service industries, the spirit of service is needed for customers to happily part with their money.
But the Japanese workplace also has a related term called サービス残業 ("overtime for service"), which is defined as employees putting in extra hours outside normal work hours, without getting paid extra for working overtime. The idea is that the employee should use their spirit of service in the context of the company, and be helpful to the employer by creating extra value without asking for extra compensation. While increasingly used in a negative light to denigrate companies that force employees to work extra hours through sheer social pressure, it remains, unfortunately, too common in Japan Inc. in the best of times.
As COVID-19 threatens not just short-term revenues but the very existence of some uncompetitive firms, overtime for service has become more justified and rational, in the eyes of company leaders. The logic is a straightforward one. Employees, during this current time of adversity, should sacrifice their own financial and even physical well-being to help the company survive through extra hard work. After all, working fewer hours and demanding more compensation today, and the company may go under and everyone will be out of a job before the COVID-19-induced economic depression ends.
This mentality is certainly not one that is new to the current coronavirus fiasco. Throughout Japan's corporate history, times of crisis, from 1970s oil shock to the 2011 earthquake, is sprinkled with stories of salarymen toughing it out in the short-term to help the company survive in the darkest of times and then achieve glory and greater development. The ability of a company's employees to overtime for service, then, is considered a virtue that illustrates the quality of the employees and the strength of company culture, giving the firm the ability to survive crises and continue growing.
Yet, this current crisis, in some ways, is without parallel. As millions of employees spend days on end stuck at home gazing into a computer screen for hours, the mental toll of a physical lockdown is significant even without doing overtime. With overtime, the boundary of private and corporate life becomes practically nonexistent. To ask the employee to do the overtime free, then, is to basically ask the employee to make the work equivalent to the private life, and make the act of doing work for the company no different from undertaking an entertaining hobby.
Of course, corporate Japan encroaching upon the private lives of its employees is nothing new. Often, the company becomes the private social circles for many. But at least before the current pandemic, the work and private lives can at least be separated by geography. A place called the workplace and the place called home is separated by distance and location. By asking staff, who are working from home, to partake in overtime for service, companies are erasing the very physical boundaries between the workplace and home in an unprecedented way.
What is more, the arrival of remote working platforms is helping to speed up that process of erasure of boundaries. It is not just that messaging allows bosses to contact their subordinates whenever they feel like it. It is also not just that video calls in place of physical meetings put private homes on display for all coworkers. It is that new ways are being devised to use technology to further fuse the private and the corporate. The idea of drinking with coworkers through Zoom, and using concern for safety from the virus to ask private questions, among other subtle little changes amplified through technology, that are making the workplace omnipresent for the employee at home.
As the workplace continues to relentlessly march into the employee's home with the aid of technology, it becomes all the more difficult for the employee to say no to overtime for service. The employer knows where the employee is, and what the employee is doing at any moment in time. Excuses like being busy with other things become all the easier to refute and debunk, especially when those other things are almost publicly known to be of lower priority than sacrificing time for the struggling company. As the virus erases the division between the private and the public, it becomes ever more difficult to escape the need for the spirit of service.
As COVID-19 threatens not just short-term revenues but the very existence of some uncompetitive firms, overtime for service has become more justified and rational, in the eyes of company leaders. The logic is a straightforward one. Employees, during this current time of adversity, should sacrifice their own financial and even physical well-being to help the company survive through extra hard work. After all, working fewer hours and demanding more compensation today, and the company may go under and everyone will be out of a job before the COVID-19-induced economic depression ends.
This mentality is certainly not one that is new to the current coronavirus fiasco. Throughout Japan's corporate history, times of crisis, from 1970s oil shock to the 2011 earthquake, is sprinkled with stories of salarymen toughing it out in the short-term to help the company survive in the darkest of times and then achieve glory and greater development. The ability of a company's employees to overtime for service, then, is considered a virtue that illustrates the quality of the employees and the strength of company culture, giving the firm the ability to survive crises and continue growing.
Yet, this current crisis, in some ways, is without parallel. As millions of employees spend days on end stuck at home gazing into a computer screen for hours, the mental toll of a physical lockdown is significant even without doing overtime. With overtime, the boundary of private and corporate life becomes practically nonexistent. To ask the employee to do the overtime free, then, is to basically ask the employee to make the work equivalent to the private life, and make the act of doing work for the company no different from undertaking an entertaining hobby.
Of course, corporate Japan encroaching upon the private lives of its employees is nothing new. Often, the company becomes the private social circles for many. But at least before the current pandemic, the work and private lives can at least be separated by geography. A place called the workplace and the place called home is separated by distance and location. By asking staff, who are working from home, to partake in overtime for service, companies are erasing the very physical boundaries between the workplace and home in an unprecedented way.
What is more, the arrival of remote working platforms is helping to speed up that process of erasure of boundaries. It is not just that messaging allows bosses to contact their subordinates whenever they feel like it. It is also not just that video calls in place of physical meetings put private homes on display for all coworkers. It is that new ways are being devised to use technology to further fuse the private and the corporate. The idea of drinking with coworkers through Zoom, and using concern for safety from the virus to ask private questions, among other subtle little changes amplified through technology, that are making the workplace omnipresent for the employee at home.
As the workplace continues to relentlessly march into the employee's home with the aid of technology, it becomes all the more difficult for the employee to say no to overtime for service. The employer knows where the employee is, and what the employee is doing at any moment in time. Excuses like being busy with other things become all the easier to refute and debunk, especially when those other things are almost publicly known to be of lower priority than sacrificing time for the struggling company. As the virus erases the division between the private and the public, it becomes ever more difficult to escape the need for the spirit of service.
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