HAL Laboratory, the studio behind the much loved Kirby video game series, was in trouble with the Japanese Labour Standards Bureau last year during the pandemic. The company was taken to account by the Labour Standard Bureau as an employee at HAL said that they weren’t paid for any of the overtime work they had put in while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. HAL Laboratory responded by saying staff working remotely from home had been informed they they shouldn’t work overtime as they wouldn’t be paid the extra. The company said that it was the employee’s fault that they did any additional work outside of standard working hours and that they wouldn’t pay for it. However, this wasn’t mentioned at all in the employee’s contract with the company and the person was not told by the company when they were hired. It seems that HAL Laboratory has now paid the employee what he was owed.
Kirby developer HAL Laboratory was in trouble with Labor Standards for failure to pay remote worker’s overtime
Well it does say failure to pay, so hopefully it was a lack of oversight and not refusal. I wish all the best to the workers! Hope they get paid 🥰
But doesn’t the source state they refused to pay? :S
Worked in retail and nowhere in my contract did it say I’ll be paid OT. Any managers sometimes will say if there will be any OT or not . There are places where they will not do OT and some that will.
On one hand the employee should have asked and on the other HAL should have said something earlier. If they did say something about IT and the employee forgot then that’s on them.
As the original Japanese article says, it is different working remotely from home than when you are in an office or a retail space. Thankfully the individual was given what he was due 😊
“The work-at-home system that was urgently implemented in response to the Coronavirus pandemic was inadequately supported, and although there was a system that allowed employees to report the start of their own work, work hours were not calculated based on this system. In addition, since it was difficult to accurately grasp working hours during the period when the system was inadequate, a rule prohibiting overtime work was established to prevent employees from working overtime as a service.”
I’d love to work from home. Do an hours work, have a cup of tea, bit more work, have a nap, maybe even play switch for a bit, do some more work. Blimey it’s 9:00 pm better stop working!
Yeah maybe. But I find it best to keep work and home separate. The presence of work at home would violate the sanctity of my home. Maybe if I had a mansion and never had to see that part of it
Been working hybrid for a time now, and to me home office is where I’m 100% efficient. At site, people come and talk and wants to be chatty and stuff. All and well, but I can’t focus as much there 🤣
I have worked from home since the lock down began in the states. I am spoiled now, and could not see ever returning to and office for work.
I love what I do and I have noticed my attention is more concentrated at home. In is very small way, I think of work from home as the charity jar at a store. No one would ever take from it, because they feel they are being watched remotely, and conducts themselves properly.
I know it sounds silly, but I feel I am more monitored from home, than I ever was in our office.