The health ministry has found widespread examples of overwork and work-related stress in the entertainment and health care industries, it said in its 2024 white paper on °ì²¹°ù¨²õ³ó¾± (death from overwork) prevention measures released Friday.
A survey conducted between October and December 2023 in the arts and entertainment sector found that over 40% of technical staff and stage directors worked 60 hours or more in a week. Meanwhile, 60% of directors and producers had one day or less off per week.
The survey also asked about workplace harassment and troubles with business transactions in the industry, with 42% of respondents saying they ¡°were told hurtful things by work-related people,¡± while 22.3% ¡°had experiences related to physical abuse.¡±
Over half of respondents experienced payment issues, such as ¡°not being informed of the amount of compensation before taking a job.¡±
A separate survey concerning health care workers, including doctors and nurses, focused on cases of mental disorders between 2010 and 2020 that were recognized as work accidents worthy of compensation.
It found that mental disorders for both doctors and nurses were prevalent for those in their 30s, and that the number of cases had particularly increased among nurses in recent years.
The main cause of mental disorders among doctors was the amount of work. For nurses, the most common cause was witnessing the result of a tragic accident or natural disaster.
The white paper, the ninth one mandated by a 2014 law on preventing death from overwork, disclosed analyses of industries that were key research areas for policymaking this year.
Each analysis highlighted themes related to death from overwork, which is most commonly caused by strokes and heart attacks linked to overwork as well as by suicides due to work-related stress.
As part of the health ministry¡¯s effort to prevent death from overwork, officials are seeking to reduce long working hours by encouraging more businesses to implement a work-interval system, which guarantees a gap of a certain length between each day¡¯s work to ensure workers get enough rest on a daily basis.
The latest white paper reported that while the share of companies unaware of the interval system had increased, so had the share of businesses that had implemented it.
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