Japan Introduces Shining Mondays Scheme

Balance is important everywhere, individual to the state level. Imbalance in any side causes economic and personal harm. To counter the imbalance from workers life, Japanese government initiated the Shining Monday Scheme which would allow employees to start work late one day a month. The government urges overworked employees to take Monday mornings off.
This idea regarded as the continuation to “Premium Fridays” which introduced last February to encourage the authority to allow employees of farms to clock off early go home to their families and help boost consumer spending. The experiment started and the economy, trade and industry ministry believes the scheme would help the employees to get the much-needed lie-in at the start of the working week. According to the Sora News 24, the experiment by the ministry last Monday that allowed the staffs to arrive office after lunch had not negatively affected the ministry’s work.
Although this is not the first attempt for Japan trying to balance the employees work life and personal life, according to survey report after Premium Friday Scheme, only 11.2% employees had left the workplace early and the companies also became too busy to give people extra time off at the end of the month.
Victim of work overload Miwa Sado, who worked at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Tokyo, logged 159 hours of overtime and took only two days off in the month leading up to her death from heart failure in July 2013. Work-life balance schemes started in Japan after the death of Matsuri Takahashi a 24-year-old employee in 2015; she tweeted: “I want to die.” Another message read: “I’m physically and mentally shattered.”
> Alma Siddiqua