- Title: JAPAN: Widespread worker exploitation threatens Fukushima recovery
- Date: 25th October 2013
- Summary: IWAKI, FUKUSHIMA PREFECTURE, JAPAN (RECENT - JUNE 18, 2013 ) (REUTERS) BEACH NEAR FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI PLANT (SOUNDBITE) (Japanese) UNIDENTIFIED 55-YEAR-OLD NUCLEAR PLANT WORKER SAYING: "I was first told that I'd be cleaning up debris and the like, but once I got here I was told that I'd be going into F1. I didn't have any idea what they were talking about, so I thought the
- Embargoed: 9th November 2013 12:00
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- Location: Japan
- Country: Japan
- Topics: Disasters
- Reuters ID: LVAEVRQFQBYYYCN511U0G947S1B0
- Story Text: Two years on from Japan's massive disaster that led to the melt down of the three nuclear reactors at the plant, thousands of workers continue to work in and around Fukushima Daiichi. A Reuters investigation has unveiled a trail of exploitation for some there, compounded by a labour shortage of willing workers.
Tetsuya Hayashi, one such worker who Reuters contacted, went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He said 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 inside the plant.
"Those sent to the front lines are those who are gathered and then lied to, and then only used for a few days. Once they've been worked to the bone, then they just lie and gather a new group and it seemed like it's just that same loop over and over. So no, I don't think they're being very honest," 41-year-old Hayashi said.
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.
"They say that it's fine and alright. You can get one millisievert, but if you wait a week or 8 days and then it'll go away and will be zero. You get told it enough times and you believe it. That's what happens to most," Hayashi said.
"You get slowly but surely brainwashed to think that even that amount is alright," he added.
At one point his bosses even told him not to worry because radiation had a half-life and so wouldn't build up.
"No no, it's got a half-life. So it gradually goes down, it doesn't stay in you. If you just wait a week or about 8 days, the amount of radiation you've received goes down by half," his employer at the time said.
This statement represents a mistaken account of radiation safety standards applied in Fukushima, which are based on the view that there is no such thing as a safe dose. Workers are limited to 100 millisieverts of radiation exposure over five years.
The work in Fukushima doesn't just involve the plant but an area one third the size of Switzerland that needs to be decontaminated after nuclear disaster.
With so many contractors and some 50,000 workers having signed over over the past two years to clean up the plant and the area around in, safety standards also slip.
Ryo Goshima was hired on with a cleaning crew clearing leaves, weeds and other contaminated debris from that land had been deemed unsafe for habitation after the nearby Fukushima reactors melted down and blew apart, scattering a plume of radioactive debris across the nearby hills.
While each worker should have had their own measuring device, they left them behind when going to their work sites and their leader wrote down false information as to how much radiation the group received.
"Only our group leader had a APD (Audible Alarming Personal Dosimeter), and he is the one who actually wrote down the radiation levels each day. But when there was someone with a high radiation levels, it would be rewritten to match the lower numbers," Goshima said.
Yousuke Minaguchi, a lawyer who has represented Fukushima workers, says Japan's government has turned a blind eye to the problem of worker exploitation.
"Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Ministry of Economy or the Ministry of Health and Labor don't want to focus on this. So on the surface they say that they are looking into exposing these incidents and saying they are illegal but in reality they don't look into them. By ignoring these cases, I think they are trying to continue using labour cheaply," he said.
Like other employers in Fukushima, Tokyo Electric Power Company, widely known as Tepco, says it needs to outsource work at Fukushima because it does not have the resources or expertise needed to complete a clean-up expected to run for 30 years or more. The utility says it has been unable to monitor subcontractors fully, but has taken steps to limit worker abuses and curb the involvement of organized crime.
Tepco faces a deepening shortage of workers. There are about 25 percent more openings than applicants for jobs in Fukushima prefecture, according to government data.
"The companies then hires their own employees, taking into account the contract they sign with us. Therefore, it is very difficult for us to go in and check the contracts," explained Tepco general manager Masayuki Ono.
Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, who is responsible for Japan's energy policy and the decommissioning of the plant, admitted more could be done to ensure that regulations are being enforced.
"To get work done, it's necessary to cooperate with a large number of companies," he told Reuters. "Making sure that those relations are proper, and that work is moving forward is something we need to keep working on daily," Motegi told Reuters.
Since the disaster an estimated 50,000 workers have been hired so far to shut down the nuclear plant and decontaminate the towns and villages nearby. Thousands more will have to follow.
One 55-year-old worker at the plant, who declined to be identified for fear of losing the only job he has, was recruited in town 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) away, drove for 4 days to Fukushima only to find that he had been lied to.
"I was first told that I'd be cleaning up debris and the like, but once I got here I was told that I'd be going into F1. I didn't have any idea what they were talking about, so I thought there was some site called that. But when I thought about it I realized it was the Fukushima Daiichi plant," he said.
A Tepco survey from 2012 showed nearly half of the workers in the Fukushima were employed by one company but managed by another. Japanese law prohibits such arrangements, in order to prevent brokers from skimming workers' wages.
"So the thing is that there are second, third and fourth level subcontractors and then they skim money off and the actual money that you get goes down below 10,000 yen. And then you have lodging and food taken off, and end up with five or 6,000 yen. But there's no where to go, and no where else to eat, and so everyone just sorts of gives up as there's no other option," said the 55-year old nuclear plant worker.
Dismantling the Fukushima Daiichi plant will require maintaining a job pool of at least 12,000 workers just through 2015, up from the 6,000 now working at the plant, according to Tepco's blueprint.
Asia's largest listed power utility had long enjoyed close ties to regulators and lax government oversight. That came under harsh scrutiny after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a massive tsunami hit the plant on March 11, 2011. The immediate disaster killed nearly 16,000 people, but at the plant triggered three reactor meltdowns, a series of explosions and a radiation leak that forced 150,000 people to flee from nearby villages. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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