Don’t Work Yourself To Death

It can happen, it did happen to Kenichi Uchino. Kenichi Uchino collapsed and died on Toyota’s factory floor before dawn in February of 2002, he was into his fourth hour of overtime. That fourth hour was only four of the more than 106 hours of overtime, most of it unpaid. In his final month at the Toyota car plant he died from sudden heart failure at just 30 years old.

A district court ruled that Kenichi Uchino had literally worked himself to death. after almost six years of legal battles his widow, Hiroko won the battle while holding down her own job and raising two young children.

In Japan, workers are too often expected to sacrifice their personal lives and happiness for the company's benefit. So common place is this practice that there is a Japanese word for this -- 'karoshi', a household Japanese term meaning 'death from overwork'


"Until now, all this unpaid work has contributed to Toyota's 2 trillion yen ($18 billion) profit. As Toyota continues to grow, I hope it will return some of it to its workers. That would make it a true global leader," Hiroko Uchino said.

In Kenichi Uchino’s final week, Uchino was on the second shift at the Toyota factory, which builds the popular Prius hybrid model. According to his widow, he had a heavily overloaded work schedule and a lack of labor to help him. This usually meant that he wouldn’t get home until after 6 am which by that time he would be too exhausted to finish his breakfast or play with his children.

Hiroko Uchino, who said she was probably the first to speak out in public against Toyota on the 'karoshi' issue, accused Japanese media of being reluctant to give Toyota any negative press, fearing repercussions on advertising revenues.

"One regional paper refused to print Toyota's name, only calling them 'a carmaker in the Nagoya area'," she said. "Another magazine also refused to disclose the company, and when I saw the issue, the back cover carried a Toyota ad."


SOURCE


Leaving The Rat Race

Social Networking Websites Worth Spending Time At

Originally I was writing this for an acquaintance but found a bit of humorous fun in it so I thought I would share. Because my job and entrepreneurship depends on online popularity I have something like 80 different social networking subscriptions (profiles) and the best ones in my opinion are as follows

MySpace: Silliness, silly surveys, find old friends, look up bands you like, find new bands you may like & get updates of the next band event and generally anything extra that doesn’t have much to do with job or careers. However it is also poorly moderated and drenched in Spam

Tribe: Liberal artist free thinking place where the chances of meeting a non-psychotic person is much better here than any other place online. However…. Anyone looking for a “serious long lasting committed’ relationship is definitely a minority on Tribe. Tribe is THE community of Burners.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burner (Burning Man): A burner is anyone who participates in the creation of Burning Man art and or a Burning Man theme event or one of the many regional Burning Man events that occur outside the Black Rock Desert, or anyone who self-identifies with a core set of values manifest at such events.

Live Journal: Writing in a diary where the user has the choice to make each entry read by anyone and everyone, read only by those the user says is “Friends” or keep completely private and no one but the user can read it.

LinkedIn: I’m not a big user of LinkedIn, I find it boring and tedious and not well suited for my purposes. However, I’m also not a traditional corporate office kind of gal so the site is more geared towards business individuals in a variety of industries and career positions. Speaking in the view of someone who works in tie & jacket world, it’s a great place to network if the person is willing to put in at lease half a hour every few days to networking on the site. In a nutshell it’s MySpace without any Glamour.

Second Life: (In my opinion) This is the devil of online life where as soon as you register, log on and spend more than ten minutes in the virtual world you have typed your permission to suck your soul dry of any life offline. Sadly, it is the next big thing and many influential corporations are getting involved not only in Second Life but other potentially profitable virtual worlds. In a nutshell it is social networking but in a virtual world where you can create a character based on either you (for business) or as freakish Furrie spending real money on clothing, real estate and life (un) necessities so that your Virtual Self can live and look better than the real you.

BUT…. It is the next biggest thing in networking and for those who can either
a) Withstand the sucking of your soul and make valuable business contacts
b) Doesn’t care that a real world exist offline

It’s a great place to make business contacts. They recently held their fist virtual job fair and it was a tremendous success.


Facebook: Hate it, everyone else loves it. In my opinion it’s a better software developed website that lacks MySpace’s pretty colors and easy user friendly functionality and Tribe’s easy to locate group categorization.

Mashable: Mashable is a great resource for social networking news i.e. if your researching a project and need a bundle of resources to create a successful report / article, campaign ect…. Mashable is like a giant bucket where thousands of people pour information into different areas and those areas all have feeding tubes that lead to and into the Mashable bucket.

Craig’s List: Free stuff, decent used stuff for sale, garage & Yard sales, find a local event as well as a great place to

a) Be made fun of with your horrible dating ad
b) Learn what not to write for a dating ad
c) Read the Best of Craig’s List when you need a laugh
d) Find quick cash for a job (or someone to do it) that normally costs twice as much but lasts only one or two days
e) Potential meet a nice stranger who posses a 50% chance of being either a friend or your newest stalker
f) Lose respect and hope for humanity

Two new possibilities I’m experiencing with includes

Ning
Matador: Social networking for travelers

The Importance Of Online Social Networking