第21期 · 政府该不该立法限制工作时间

The question of whether the state should impose a statutory ceiling on working hours is one that touches on the fundamental tension between market freedom and human welfare. In an era where mobile devices have blurred the boundary between office and home, the notion of a fixed working day has become, for many, a nostalgic fiction. I firmly agree that government intervention is not merely desirable but essential: left unregulated, the labour market tends to exploit workers' willingness to sacrifice health for job security, and only legislation can re-establish a humane baseline. Admittedly, the case against government-mandated hour limits is not without merit. Critics rightly point out that rigid caps can stifle productivity in industries where intense, time-bounded effort is integral to success. A surgeon performing a complex operation, a software engineer racing to patch a critical vulnerability, or a founder scrambling to launch a product — all rely on the flexibility to work beyond conventional hours. Moreover, in competitive global markets, nations that impose strict limits risk driving businesses to jurisdictions with looser regulations, a phenomenon economists term 'regulatory arbitrage'. These concerns are legitimate, and any well-designed policy must accommodate them through exemptions for specific sectors and roles. Notwithstanding these caveats, the human cost of unregulated working hours is simply too grave to be left to market forces. Japan's 'karoshi' — death from overwork — is not an aberration but a systemic symptom of a culture that equates exhaustion with dedication. Between 2015 and 2019, the Japanese government officially recognised hundreds of karoshi cases annually, and these figures almost certainly underestimate the true toll, since families are reluctant to pursue claims that might stigmatise the deceased's employer. Beyond the extreme of mortality, chronic overwork corrodes mental health, fractures family relationships, and paradoxically diminishes productivity as exhausted employees make more errors and take more sick leave. The European Union's Working Time Directive, which caps the working week at 48 hours including overtime, demonstrates that reasonable limits are compatible with economic competitiveness — several EU member states consistently rank among the world's most productive economies. France has gone further still, enacting a 'right to disconnect' that protects employees from after-hours work communication, a policy that acknowledges a truth employers conveniently ignore: rest is not the absence of work, but a precondition for sustainable performance. In sum, the regulation of working hours is a domain where government intervention is not an intrusion on individual liberty but a safeguard of it. Without statutory protections, the 'choice' to work excessive hours is rarely a genuine choice at all — it is coercion dressed in the language of commitment. Sensible legislation, modelled on the EU's directive but tailored to each nation's economic context, can preserve the flexibility that certain professions demand while establishing a floor below which no employer may sink. The goal is not to ban hard work, but to ensure that hard work remains a sustainable choice rather than a slow form of self-destruction.