Japan govt agency staff punished with pay cuts for leaving work 2 mins early; called out

Several staff members from the Funabashi City Board of Education in Japan were recently punished with pay cuts for leaving office just two minutes early. According to the Sankei News, the authorities found 316 departures that had taken place between May 2019 to January 2021. When asked by officials, the workers said that they punched out two minutes earlier as they wanted to go home early to catch the 5:17 pm bus, which if they missed, they would be forced to catch the next bus at 5:47 pm. 

According to the Japanese media outlet, in some cases, the company had also found that several employees had written false times on their cards in order to log out early. They also found that a senior employee was taking the lead when it comes to logging out early. As a punishment, the “gang leader’s”—a 59-year-old female employee—one-tenth of the salary will be deducted for the next three months. 

The officials found that she had been logging out two minutes early every day instead of logging out at 5:15 pm, which was her scheduled time. The company authorities also gave two other senior employees written warnings. Four others were also given strict notices. 

Netizens call out Board of Education 

Following the news, Japanese netizens were quick to call out the Board of Education and pointed out that if a staff was getting penalised for leaving two minutes early, should he or she get paid overtime when they leave one minute later? One user even said, “It would be nice if, when they found out about the bus timetable, they could make some flexible arrangement for government workers like getting them to come in a bit earlier instead”. 

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that this is not the first time such an incident has been reported in Japan. Back in 2018, a civil servant was punished after it was found that he was leaving his desk three minutes before his designated lunch break in order to buy lunch. According to reports, the employee was punished for eating his lunch three minutes before he was “supposed to”.

(Rep Image: Unsplash)