Dentsu Inc offices were yesterday raided by Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare officials looking for evidence that the advertising firm’s employees exceeded legal limits on overtime hours, after a worker’s suicide drew national attention to one of the country’s largest and most prestigious companies.
Dentsu will cooperate fully with the probe, Shusaku Kannan, a spokesman for Japan’s biggest ad agency, said by telephone yesterday.
The government will pursue a criminal complaint if it finds evidence that the company violated laws related to overtime hours, said a ministry official, who asked not to be identified per internal policy.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga yesterday highlighted the Dentsu case in a regular briefing with reporters, saying the advertising agency would be dealt with appropriately and that the government is working on labor law reforms to prevent deaths from overwork.
Work issues were a contributing factor in 2,159 suicides last year, a ministry white paper published last month said, citing data from the Japanese National Police Agency and Cabinet Office.
The suicide of Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old employee of the ad agency, on Dec. 25 last year drew renewed attention to work conditions that have been blamed for workers taking their own life at companies including major restaurant chains.
Dentsu on Tuesday last week said it was setting up an internal committee headed by CEO Tadashi Ishii to eliminate death by overwork.
“Enforcement of working hours laws is getting stricter,” Tokyo-based Shinkin Asset Management Co chief fund manager Naoki Fujiwara said. “Big restaurant chains like Watami and Sukiya have been probed in the past for overwork and now the spotlight is on Dentsu.”
Fifty firms, including Daiwa Securities Group Inc and Seven & I Holdings Co, have signed a pact on the Cabinet’s Web site saying they are committed to ending excessive work hours.
Dentsu last month said it would reduce the limit for overtime work from 70 hours to 65 hours per month starting this month, after an employee’s suicide was blamed on overwork.
Ishii yesterday addressed employees at the company’s headquarters about what the company was doing to improve work conditions and eliminate death from overwork. The speech was simulcast on the Internet to the company’s offices in Osaka and Nagoya, Japan.
The company’s stock was little changed, gaining 0.4 percent, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in the Nikkei 225, as of the close of trading in Tokyo yesterday.
Dentsu, which calls itself the world’s largest brand agency and third-biggest for media, controls 25 percent of Japan’s market and is especially dominant in controlling the flow of advertising into major domestic TV networks and newspapers.
The agency’s clients have included LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, Diageo PLC, Nestle SA, SoftBank Group Corp and Electronic Arts Inc, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
It had about 43,000 employees in 124 countries, with about 49 percent in Japan, its annual report showed.
Nearly one-quarter of Japan’s companies had reported some workers logging more than 80 hours of overtime per month, according to a ministry survey of more than 1,700 firms last fiscal year.
Almost one-quarter of employees worked more than 49 hours per week, compared with 16 percent in the US, 13 percent in the UK and 32 percent in South Korea, the ministry said in a paper on karoshi, or death from overwork.
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