Widow demands redress for suicide over Y2K overwork

.c Kyodo News Service

OSAKA, July 9 (Kyodo) - The wife of a steel wholesale company employee in Hyogo Prefecture who committed suicide applied Friday for compensation to the Osaka West Labor Standard Inspection Office, saying her husband killed himself because of overwork.

The 41-year-old woman said her husband, 40, who worked for an Osaka steel wholesaler committed suicide due to mental and physical stress caused by overwork. She said excessively heavy duties were assigned to him by the company to deal with potential problems from the year 2000 (Y2K) computer problem.

''He committed suicide after suffering mental disorder caused by stress from being forced to work excessively as a supervisor,'' the application said.

The man killed himself by jumping off an apartment building in February 1998 after telling his family he had trouble at work and wanted to die, the representative of the woman said.

The man was in charge of dealing with the millennium bug problem at the company and was distressed about supervising a professional in computer science who had been hired to help him.

He would go to work at 7 a.m. and come home around 10 p.m., but often continued to work at home with a computer. He was given a desk and a chair for the computer in December 1997 by the company to work at home, the representative said.

The company said it hired the computer professional in order to lessen the man's burden at work, and is not convinced that the work alone caused his death because it did not consider the work as excessively severe.

The Y2K problem concerns computers that identify years by their last two digits. Unless corrected, they may misread 2000 as 1900, and fail to process data for the year 2000 and beyond.

-- it (gets@weirder.andweirder), July 09, 1999

Answers

One more for Cory's list.

-- Mike Lang (webflier@erols.com), July 09, 1999.

Sad.

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), July 09, 1999.

I think that I can understand where he was probably coming from. Too much work, no chance of finishing on time...

The question is, will we be seeing much of this in the US? Not necessarily suicide, but discouraged programmers?

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), July 09, 1999.