A 61-year-old civil servant in Japan was handed a fine of 1.44 million yen (approximately Rs 9 lakh) after getting caught for smoking during office hours. As per a report published on Strait Times, the employee had smoked more than 4500 times in the last 14 years of his service.
The prefectural government also revealed that the civil servant had smoked for 355 hours and 19 minutes while on duty.
The report added that authorities in Osaka had taken action against the employee and two other colleagues who worked in the prefecture's finance department. The authorities imposed a 10 per cent pay cut for six months for repeatedly smoking during work hours despite being warned several times.
The report also that out of the three, the 61-year-old employee was found to have violated the "duty of devotion" rule.
The human resource department, in 2022, received information that the three employees were secretly smoking. The trio was then summoned by their supervisor and were given warnings. However, they refused to stop smoking and even lied about it when they were interviewed in December 2022.
The penalty on the employee drew mixed reactions from others. Some argued that to go and smoke off-site would have wasted more time, others felt that employee had been treated harshly and stated that one could waste time by eating snacks, drinking tea, or just chatting. None of those were punishable offences and so, neither should smoking tobacco be a punishable offence.
Since 2019, government employees in Japan have been barred from smoking while on duty.
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