In this race to the bottom over workers' rights and pay, many subcontractors with allegedly questionable connections gained control of the impoverished Fukushima prefecture's market for cleanup jobs. It is those companies that have taken advantage of the staggering shortage of cleanup workers and allowed companies associated with the plant with alleged ties with Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza, to flourish. And there are close to 50 gangs affiliated with three major syndicates in the prefecture alone -- a fact that had an effect on the local labor market long before the tragedy of March 2011.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (L) sees off workers leaving for a patrol of tanks containing radioactive water after greeting them at the emergency operation center of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (AFP Photo/Japan Pooll)
With subcontractors only focused on their own bottom line, their activities are not scrutinized by any governing authority. Worst of all, the subcontractors often have little or no experience in the nuclear cleanup sector.
A survey earlier this year revealed that close to 70 percent of small firms provided with decontamination work contracts did not follow labor regulations. The fact was reported by the labor ministry in July.
But Japanese Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, who is in charge of decommissioning the plant, has claimed that he can only go so far in telling TEPCO to improve workers' conditions. "To get work done, it's necessary to cooperate with a large number of companies," he said.
When a police task force was set up to target criminal involvement in the cleanup efforts, huge amounts of money were found to have been embezzled. But akin to TEPCO's apparent inability to supervise any activities outside its own immediate agreement with the government, a spokesman for Obayashi, one of the Big Four, claimed that the corporation "did not notice" that one of its subcontractors was hiring workers from the yakuza.
Obayashi pointed instead to its deals with subcontractors, in which they "have clauses on not cooperating with organized crime."
Fukushima reliant on cheap laborTEPCO is also finding that decommissioning Fukushima is a particularly cumbersome task and a nightmare to oversee. The cooling system alone requires thousands of workers to daily maintain its operation, and has to deal with the equivalent of 130 Olympic-sized stadiums full of contaminated water each day. A total of 12,000 workers will need to be hired before 2015, TEPCO forecasts. That is in comparison to slightly more than 8,000 workers currently registered at the plant. Recently that number was 6,000.
Making things even more complicated, the problems faced by Fukushima's chaotic labor market have their roots dating back all to the 1970s.
Japan's nuclear industry has been relying on cheap labor for over four decades, often recruiting workers from impoverished areas around Tokyo and Osaka, which are awash with indigent men seeking employment. Hayashi is but one of an estimated 50,000 workers hired so far for the clean-up. These indigent workers, known colloquially as "nuclear gypsies," are easy targets for subcontractors looking to hire workers on the cheap.
"Working conditions in the nuclear industry have always been bad," Reuters cited Saburo Murata, deputy director of Osaka's Chuo Hospital, as saying. "Problems with money, outsourced recruitment, lack of proper health insurance -- these have existed for decades."
And the fallout from the March 2011 Fukushima disaster only serves to highlight these long-standing issues.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Japan's parliament agreed to direct funds for the facility's decontamination and closing. But the bill failed to include existing regulations applied to the construction industry. This detail meant that contractors supplying casual workers were not required to disclose their management practices or be subject to any background checks. Consequently, anyone could become a nuclear contractor, with neither TEPCO nor the government any the wiser.
Workers wearing protective suits and masks are seen next to the spent fuel pool inside the Common Pool Building, where all the nuclear fuel rods will be stored for decommissioning, at the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the town of Okuma, Fukushima prefecture (AFP Photo/Issei Kato)
The contractors quickly rushed in to secure job deals, and to stay ahead of the competition they often used brokers to do the recruitment for them; naturally, without asking questions.
In some cases, workers in debt to the yakuza would be hired, with brokers deducting their debts directly from their wage packets -- often brown envelopes. What would follow was labor at sharply reduced wages, as the men worked tirelessly to pay back the brokers that hired them. The wages they were promised in the beginning are one-third below the national average. TEPCO does not publish its hourly rates, prompting Reuters to raise the issue with the workers themselves. Averaging $12 an hour, pay can dip as low as $6.
Speaking to Reuters, Lake Barrett, a former US nuclear regulator and an advisor to TEPCO, said that changing the system quickly would be impossible.
"There's been a century of tradition of big Japanese companies using contractors, and that's just the way it is in Japan ... you're not going to change that overnight just because you have a new job here, so I think you have to adapt."
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