"企業に過労死の責任を追求するためのオンライン署名にご協力ください！" 7 Jan 2021

[Japanese-to-English translation provided by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.]

NPO POSSE is supporting a family who has filed a lawsuit seeking a company's responsibility over the death of a loved one due to death by overwork...

…My [(son of the deceased)] father passed away from a hemorrhagic stroke in 2011 due to excessive work hours. He was 51 years old. In 2017, my family sued three executives at his former company, Sansei Co., Ltd., to seek responsibility for his death by overwork. In March 2020, the district court handed down a decision. However, we cannot accept this unfair judgment and are currently fighting the case at the high court.

In the month before his death, my father workers 85 hours and 48 minutes. In the prior month, he worked 111 hours and 9 minutes—numbers that far exceed the karoshi [(death by overwork)] line set by the government on medical grounds. However, we have not received an explanation or apology from my father’s company, which denied responsibility by claiming he died due to health conditions.

We filed a workplace accident claim by chance after learning about it from an acquaintance. My father’s death was ruled a workplace accident a year after his passing. Although the government officially recognized his death as karoshi, I was unable to receive compensation from his employer because it was dissolved several months after the official decision.

However, in the March decision by the district court, it issued an unfair decision, stating that my father’s death was attributed to“personal responsibility”and not the company executives…

The Yokohama District Court’s judgement that karoshi can be attributed to a worker’s “personal responsibility” is unjust, running counter to the government’s karoshi measures…