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CEO of Japan's biggest ad company to resign over employee's suicide

Xinhua, December 29, 2016 Adjust font size:

Tadashi Ishii, the CEO of Japan's biggest advertising company Dentsu Inc., announced Wednesday that he would resign, due to an overloaded employee killing herself more than a year ago.

"It is extremely regrettable that we could not prevent overwork by a new recruit....In order to take full responsibility, I would like to resign as president at a board meeting in January," Ishii was quoted as saying by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

The announcement was made public at a news conference held after Japanese labor ministry referred Dentsu and one of its executives to prosecutors.

Meanwhile, the company confirmed in its official news release that Ishii's successor would be appointed at January's board meeting.

Papers were filed with prosecutors' office, which could pave the way for criminal charges against anyone directly responsible for the suicide of a 24-year-old female worker, who jumped from a building on Dec. 25, 2015.

The death of Matsuri Takahashi was investigated by Japan's labor authorities with results showing the young woman had been forced to work illegally unregistered long hours.

Dentsu was suspected by labor authorities of violating the limits of 8 working hours per day and 40 hours per week provided by the labor standards law, which came into effect in November 2014 and held the state responsible for taking measures to prevent death and suicides caused by overwork.

Dentsu in mid-October lowered the worktime limit from 70 to 65 hours a month, according to the company spokesman Shusaku Kannan. The cut was another step taken by the company after the suicide of Takahashi, who had been working for over 100 hours a month before she suffered from depression.

A first-ever white paper on "karoshi," or death from overwork in Japanese, released by the Japanese government in October showed that 11 percent of surveyed companies saw employees logging a maximum of between 80 and 100 hours overtime a month, and 12 percent had employees working a maximum exceeding 100 hours a month.

Some 32.8 percent of workers in all industries said that their accumulated level of fatigue was "high" or "very high", with the proportion of workers with such feelings in hotel and food service industry the highest, reaching 40.3 percent. Endi