Working hour schemes for white-collar employees in Japan

Currently in Japan, regulations concerning the working hours of whitecollar employees have come under scrutiny. As the performance-based wage system is being more widely applied to white-collar workers, there are increasing calls to revise the linkage between working hours and wage determination, a policy that is prevalent under conventional human resource management. One typical example is the request to adopt a “white-collar exemption scheme” whereby white-collar workers would be exempt from coverage offered by regulations on working hours under the Labour Standards Law. However, there are certain factors which should cause one to hesitate before moving towards such an exclusion. Although official statistics show that total annual working hours have decreased —– to 1,837 hours in 2002 —unpaid overtime (the infamous so-called “service overtime”) has again become a focus of attention, mostly due to the spread of the selfdeclaration system in the management of working hour and the management scheme known as total labor expenses. To deal with this state of affairs, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2001 published “criteria for measures that employers should take to gain a proper grasp of working hours (Labour Standards Bureau Notification [kihatsu] No. 339, April 6, 2001),” and put supervision and guidance concerning unpaid overtime at the top of their priority list. As a result, in 2002, the number of cases heard by Labour Standards Inspection Bureaus in which they called for unpaid overtime to be paid more than doubled in a 10 year period, marking a record high of approximately 17,000 cases. At the same time, similar cases sent to the Public