Toyota employee ’worked to death’

A Toyota employee died of overwork after logging more than 106 hours' overtime in one month, a judge ruled on Friday to reverse a ministry's earlier decision not to pay compensation to his widow.

The Toyota Labour Standards Inspection office, a local branch of Japan's labor ministry, refused to pay the widow the usual compensation for a spouse's work-related death. The company claimed he had logged only 45 hours' overtime in the month before he died, Japanese media reported.

But the court ruled that the employee had worked far more than that, said Yomiuri Online, a Japanese news website The Nagoya District Court in central Japan said the ruling overturned the labor ministry's decision.

"We want to think how to respond to this ruling by discussing it with relevant agencies," an official at the Toyota Labour Standards Inspection Office told Reuters.

The man, who was working at a Toyota factory in central Japan, died of irregular heartbeat in February 2002 after passing out in the factory around 4am.

"(The employee) worked for extremely long hours and the relationship between his work and death is strong," Yomiuri Online quoted Judge Toshiro Tamiya as saying. Motoring.co.nz