Reuters Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters reuters/article/2013/10/25/us-fukushima-workers-specialreport-idUSBRE99O04320131025 Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters By Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito IWAKI | Fri Oct 25, 2013 11:20am EDT 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 Fukushimas hottest radiation zones. Raising wages could draw more workers but that has not happened, the data shows. Tepco is under pressure to post a profit in the year to March 2014 under a turnaround plan Japans top banks recently financed with $5.9 billion in new loans and refinancing. In 2011, in the wake of the disaster, Tepco cut pay for its own workers by 20 percent. Japans nuclear industry has relied on cheap labor since the first plants, including Fukushima, opened in the 1970s. For years, the industry has rounded up itinerant workers known as nuclear gypsies from the Sanya neighborhood of Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka, areas known for large numbers of homeless men. A Tepco survey from 2012 showed nearly half of the workers at Fukushima were employed by one contractor but managed by another. Japanese law prohibits such arrangements, in order to prevent brokers from skimming workers wages. Yousuke Minaguchi, a lawyer who has represented Fukushima workers, says Japans government has turned a blind eye to the problem of worker exploitation. On the surface, they say it is illegal. But in reality they dont want to do anything. By not punishing anyone, they can keep using a lot of workers cheaply.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 16:24:59 +0000
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