Young Worker Clocked 159 Hours of Overtime in a Month. Then She Died.
October 6, 2017 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Comments Off
In a 2016 government report on karoshi, nearly a quarter of companies surveyed said that some employees were working more than 80 hours of overtime a month. Months later, the president of the advertising agency Dentsu resigned after an outcry over the 2015 death of an employee, Matsuri Takahashi, 24, who jumped from the roof of an employee dormitory.
Like Ms. Takahashi, Ms. Sado was a young woman making her way in a blue-chip organization. Her employer is considered one of the most prestigious companies in Japan, a country where exhaustion is often seen as a sign of diligence.
A 2014 government investigation found that Ms. Sado’s death was a direct result of her work life.
“She was under circumstances that she could not secure enough days off due to responsibilities that required her to stay up very late,” the labor office in the Shibuya section of Tokyo said in a statement to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The office described her as being “in a state of accumulated fatigue and chronic sleep deprivation” at the time her death.
The broadcaster said it had delayed revealing details about Ms. Sado’s death out of respect for her family and timed the release to coincide with planned workplace changes.
“We decided to disclose her death to all of our employees and to the public to share the company’s resolve to prevent a recurrence and follow through with reforms,” NHK said.
Ryoichi Ueda, the president of NHK, said that Ms. Sado’s parents “hoped we would take utmost efforts so that another such case won’t happen again.”
Newsletter Sign Up
Continue reading the main story
Thank you for subscribing.
An error has occurred. Please try again later.
You are already subscribed to this email.
But Ms. Sado’s parents criticized NHK’s response as inadequate. In a statement published by the Asahi Shimbun on Thursday, they said they feared that her death would be forgotten and “wondered if the company would keep hiding it, or why the union kept silent.”
Her parents also asked why the company had not limited their daughter’s working hours.
“It is an abnormal work situation to work almost every day on Saturday and Sunday, working until late at night every day, so we cannot understand why such a situation was overlooked,” their statement said.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Although they did not immediately publicize their daughter’s death, they said that Ms. Takahashi’s case had spurred them to publicly discuss it.
They also criticized NHK for not disseminating news of their daughter’s death throughout the company. They said that other employees — even journalists who had reported on other cases of karoshi — did not know that one of their colleagues had died from the condition.
Karoshi, which has included the burden of entertaining clients or bosses in some industries, has long prompted calls for legislation.
The Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training, in a white paper released last year on the prevention of karoshi, noted that the “undeniable problems in Japan’s work environment” were especially detrimental to regular employees under age 35.
National guidelines use a threshold of 100 hours of overtime in a month — or an average of 80 hours of monthly overtime in a six-month period — to determine whether a worker is at risk of physical or mental harm. Those guidelines were put forward by a government panel in April, but critics say that more is needed.
In February, the Japanese government and the Keidanren, Japan’s largest business group, introduced an effort dubbed “Premium Friday” that encouraged companies to allow workers to leave the office at 3 p.m. on the last Friday of the month.
Only a fraction of companies are participating.
Continue reading the main story
Share and Enjoy
New NSA Breach Linked to Popular Russian Antivirus Software
October 6, 2017 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Comments Off
The concerns about Kaspersky Lab date back many years, in part because its founder, Eugene Kaspersky, attended a K.G.B. technical college and served in military intelligence. Tim Evans, a former National Security Agency lawyer, said that in 2008 he was dispatched by the agency to the United States Patent Office to retrieve every patent application filed by Kaspersky so that the agency could study the names of its employees for known officers of the F.S.B., the K.G.B.’s successor.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
“This is an old question for N.S.A.,” said Mr. Evans, now with Adlumin, a cybersecurity contractor.
While federal prosecutors in Maryland are handling the case, the agency employee who took the documents home does not appear to have been charged. In the past, taking classified information from agency premises and storing it on an insecure computer has been considered a prosecutable offense. John M. Deutch, who served as director of the C.I.A. in 1995 and 1996, was investigated after classified information was found on his unclassified laptops. He agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor but was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
Credit
Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
The breach is only the latest blow to the National Security Agency, which for decades has broken foreign codes and eavesdropped on telephone and other communications. Today it devotes a huge effort as well to penetrating computer networks overseas to gather information.
In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, an agency contractor in Hawaii, took hundreds of thousands of classified documents, flew to Hong Kong and turned the material over to journalists. Last year, another contractor, Harold T. Martin III, was discovered to have taken an even larger quantity of agency data to his Maryland home, where he stored it in his car and in a shed in his yard. About the same time Mr. Martin was arrested, the unidentified Shadow Brokers began to post some of the agency’s most guarded software tools on the web.
“They just keep getting hammered,” said Robert S. Johnston, the president of Adlumin and another former agency officer. “N.S.A. used to say they’d never had a spy. That’s totally changed since 2013.”
Several former agency officers said the breach might not necessarily require complicity on the part of Kaspersky Lab. Antivirus software routinely scans files to hunt for malware and even uploads files to the cloud for particular study. By redirecting data between the employee’s computer and Kaspersky back to their own servers, via a “man in the middle attack,” or hacking Kaspersky’s software and adding a back door, Russian operators could have potentially downloaded the employee’s files without Kaspersky’s knowledge.
“Antivirus software could totally be used for espionage,” said Jake Williams, a former officer at the agency and the founder of Rendition Infosec, a cybersecurity contractor. “It looks damning for Kaspersky, but we don’t yet know the whole story.”
Continue reading the main story