For those of you who are not self-employed, how big an issue is unpaid overtime at your workplace?

Big. In my current office, rendering overtime must be applied and approved before you do the actual overtime. But there are lots of cases where you're just asked out of the blue to do overtime, and getting the paperwork for it is done after, and there are cases where it doesn't get approved. So you're left with doing it for free, which is absolutely unfair. Another hiccup in the system in my work is once you've finished your overtime, you only get the amount of hours you served beyond the clock and is added to your leave credits, not to your bank account. Think I'd prefer getting more money than leaves.

Which is why people at my place hate doing overtime because of these abusive systems.

When I worked I pretty much did overtime by my own decision. As a college instructor, if it took me 3 extra hours to prepare something for class, then it took me 3 hours. No one paid me. I loved teaching and it was almost as fun as preparing a lesson-plan that was instructive and fun for the students. My favorite was to prepare things so that it looked like I had just thought them, or to make up jokes and pretend they had just occurred to me.

Ah, those were the days. Most of my peers ran a pretty standard course and got pretty standard results. I had more fun than they did and to this day I once in a while come across a former student and we are both thrilled.

I say all that, but for office workers, constructors, truck drivers . . . and any job like that, there should be no unpaid overtime at all. None. It is criminal not to pay a person for the work they do.

no overtime here.ever.so no issues.

Not an issue at all for the non-Japanese workers. You know the rest.

Same. It happens with some Japanese staff at my office, but not with most of us foreigners. I think my (Japanese) boss is more scared of us than we are of him.

As a licensed high school teacher in Japan, I get paid overtime from 15 minutes past 5:00. I clock in at 8:30

Credit where credit is due: OT has dropped dramatically where I work, with most people leaving 10-20 minutes after quitting time. I'm not a fan of all the control and "spying" that we also now have -- your computer login time and building entry time are tracked and matched and an alert is sent if there's a mismatch -- but I certainly like going home at a reasonable hour.