Reuters on Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters

[thomas]

Yesterday, Reuters released a report on the clean-up efforts around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant, exposing the semi-legal/illegal methods employed by subcontractors who hire much-needed nuclear workers for Tepco. The company sits atop a pyramid of those subcontractors that can run to seven or more layers and includes construction giants such as Kajima Corp and Obayashi Corp in the first tier.

Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters

Tetsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks.

Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima's hottest radiation zones.

He was told he would have to wear an oxygen tank and a double-layer protective suit. Even then, his handlers told him, the radiation would be so high it could burn through his annual exposure limit in just under an hour.

"I felt cheated and entrapped," Hayashi said. "I had not agreed to any of this."

When Hayashi took his grievances to a firm on the next rung up the ladder of Fukushima contractors, he says he was fired. He filed a complaint but has not received any response from labor regulators for more than a year. All the eight companies involved, including embattled plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, declined to comment or could not be reached for comment on his case.

Not only are workers lured with empty promises about no to low radiation, their safety regulations are routinely ignored, and their wages and government-funded hazard allowances either cut or not paid at all.

Tepco does not publish average hourly wages in the plant. Workers interviewed by Reuters said wages could be as low as around $6 an hour, but usually average around $12 an hour - about a third lower than the average in Japan's construction industry. Workers for subcontractors in the most-contaminated area outside the plant are supposed to be paid an additional government-funded hazard allowance of about $100 per day, although many report it has not been paid.

With the Olympic Games just seven years away, the need for additional manpower will only be increasing.

Dismantling the Fukushima Daiichi plant will require maintaining a job pool of at least 12,000 workers just through 2015, according to Tepco's blueprint. That compares to just over 8,000 registered workers now. In recent months, some 6,000 have been working inside the plant. The Tepco hiring estimate does not include the manpower required for the government's new $330 million plan to build a massive ice wall around the plant to keep radiated water from leaking into the sea.

I wonder if these facts are also reported in the Japanese media.

Read the article here

=> Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters | Reuters