A Japanese company is offering non-smoking employees extra days off
Date:2019-12-7 20:41:04 Clicks:619 【Font Size:
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A company in Japan is offering its non-smoking employees an extra 6 days off a year to make up for smoking breaks of smoking employees and encourage quitting.
Japan is well known for being a smoker-friendly country, and around one-sixth (17.7%) of adults in the country are smokers. To improve the air quality before the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, the Japanese Government has strengthened tobacco control measures in recent years, such as its first national smoking ban to prohibit smoking in public facilities. To uphold the smoke-free concept, a Japanese company has launched a scheme, offering extra days off to non-smoking employees. The scheme followed the complaint from one of the non-smoking employees that they were working longer hours than smoking employees, who took around 15 minutes to go from the office to the basement level for each smoking break. The CEO of the company agreed that the smoking breaks were unfair to the non-smoking employees. He decided to compensate the non-smoking employees by offering them an extra 6 days of paid time-off every year, and hoped the scheme would motivate employees to quit smoking. The scheme has already benefited 30 non-smoking employees and motivated 4 smoking employees to quit.
The Hong Kong Government has been adopting multi-pronged tobacco control measures, including legislation, law enforcement, publicity, education, provision of smoking cessation services and taxation to discourage smoking, contain the proliferation of tobacco use and minimize the impact of involuntary tobacco smoke exposure on the public. With nearly 4 decades of efforts, the smoking prevalence has significantly dropped from over 20% in the 1980s to 10% in 2017. The Government has also laid down the target of further reducing smoking prevalence to 7.8% by 2025. To achieve the goal, COSH urges the Government to continue to strengthen the tobacco control measures, including expansion of statutory smoke-free area.