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NY Times, Mar. 17 2014
Unskilled and Destitute Are Hiring Targets for Fukushima Cleanup
By HIROKO TABUCHI
NARAHA, Japan — “Out of work? Nowhere to live? Nowhere to go? Nothing to
eat?” the online ad reads. “Come to Fukushima.”
That grim posting targeting the destitute, by a company seeking laborers
for the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, is one of the starkest
indications yet of an increasingly troubled search for workers willing
to carry out the hazardous decommissioning at the site.
The plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco,
has been shifting its attention away, leaving the complex cleanup to an
often badly managed, poorly trained, demoralized and sometimes unskilled
work force that has made some dangerous missteps. At the same time, the
company is pouring its resources into another plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa,
that it hopes to restart this year as part of the government’s push to
return to nuclear energy three years after the world’s second-worst
nuclear disaster. It is a move that some members of the country’s
nuclear regulatory board have criticized.
That shift in attention has translated into jobs at Fukushima that pay
less and are more sporadic, chasing away qualified workers. Left behind,
laborers and others say, is a work force often assembled by fly-by-night
labor brokers with little technical or safety expertise and even less
concern about hiring desperate people. Police and labor activists say
some of the most aggressive of the brokers have mob ties.
Regulators, contractors and more than 20 current and former workers
interviewed in recent months say the deteriorating labor conditions are
a prime cause of a string of large leaks of contaminated water and other
embarrassing errors that have already damaged the environment and, in
some cases, put workers in danger. In the worst-case scenario, experts
fear, struggling workers could trigger a bigger spill or another
radiation release.
“There is a crisis of manpower at the plant,” said Yukiteru Naka,
founder of Tohoku Enterprise, a contractor and former plant engineer for
General Electric. “We are forced to do more with less, like firemen
being told to use less water even though the fire’s still burning.”
That crisis was especially evident one dark morning last October, when a
crew of contract workers was sent to remove hoses and valves as part of
a long-overdue upgrade to the plant’s water purification system.
According to regulatory filings by Tepco, the team received only a
20-minute briefing from their supervisor and were given no diagrams of
the system they were to fix and no review of safety procedures — a
scenario a former supervisor at the plant called unthinkable. Worse yet,
the laborers were not warned that a hose near the one they would be
removing was filled with water laced with radioactive cesium.
As the men shambled off in their bulky protective gear, their
supervisor, juggling multiple responsibilities, left to check on another
crew. They chose the wrong hose, and a torrent of radioactive water
began spilling out. Panicked, the workers thrust their gloved hands into
the water to try to stop the leak, spraying themselves and two other
workers who raced over to help.
Although the workers received significant exposures, Shigeharu Nakachi,
an expert in the health effects of pollution, said it was not enough to
cause radiation sickness. Still, he said such exposures were “something
that should be avoided at all cost.”
Tepco has refused to say how experienced these workers were, but
according to regulatory filings, the company that hired them signed a
contract for the work a week before the leak. Tepco also refused to say
whether the contractor procured them from labor brokers, which is an
often illegal if widely accepted part of hiring at nuclear plants. In a
written reply to questions, Tepco said it was “not in a position to
comment on the employment practices” of its contractors.
Similarly, Tepco has refused to divulge a full accounting of a recent
leak at the plant — the worst spill in six months — which occurred when
workers filling storage tanks with contaminated water remotely diverted
it into the wrong tank. But even the scant information available points
to confusion by workers. They ignored alarms warning of an overflow
because so many tanks are near capacity, alarms ring all the time. No
one noticed that water levels in the tank that was supposed to be
receiving the water never rose.
“It’s an extremely elementary mistake,” Toyoshi Fuketa, a commissioner
at the Nuclear Regulation Authority, said at a recent hearing. “If a
fire alarm went off in your house, you’d be worried, let alone a nuclear
power plant.”
Tepco’s deputy nuclear chief, Masayuki Ono, later explained that “it did
not occur to us to actually go to the scene to check.”
At the heart of the plant’s problems is a multitiered hiring system in
the nuclear industry that critics have long said allowed the large
utilities that run the plants to distance themselves from troubles that
arise. Under the system, it hires contractors who parcel out work to
several layers of subcontractors. At the bottom, subjected to the
dirtiest work, are the so-called “nuclear Gypsies” — itinerant laborers
lured by the industry’s generally good wages.
The accident has only magnified the problems the system allows.
According to company records, contract workers at Fukushima Daiichi
receive, on average, more than twice the radiation exposure of Tepco
employees. The layered system, many say, also allows for relatively
little oversight by Tepco.
In a recent interview, a Tepco spokeswoman said that the company
regularly evaluated its contractors and required them to provide their
workers with a class on the basics of radiation. (She denied charges of
widespread cheating made by some workers.)
But at a news conference last month, the chief nuclear regulator,
Shunichi Tanaka, said, “There is a subcontracting structure that means
even workers from third- or fourth-level contractors work at the site,
and Tepco does not have a clear picture of what’s happening on the ground.”
Mr. Naka, the contractor who talked of a manpower crisis, said many of
his best engineers — including those who battled explosions and fires in
the early days of the crisis — have either quit, or cannot work at the
plant because they have reached legal radiation limits for the year.
Yoshitatsu Uechi is one of the people who has stepped in for more
experienced workers. A former bus driver and construction worker, Mr.
Uechi has never before worked at a nuclear plant.
He was paid about $150 a day to work on one of the plant’s most pressing
jobs: building tanks to store the vast quantities of contaminated water
at the site. He describes hurried days, saying he was told at one point
by his contractor to continue sealing the seams of the tanks despite
rain and snow that made the sealant slide off.
He believes such slipshod work eventually compromised the tanks, some of
which have since leaked.
“I spoke out many times on the defects, but nobody listened,” said Mr.
Uechi, a father of four who says he left Okinawa and its depressed
economy for Fukushima to provide a better life for his children. He said
he rarely saw Tepco managers while on the job.
He said he expressed his worries not only to his immediate bosses, but
to Tepco. (Asked about the complaints, Tepco said it could not discuss
individual workers out of privacy concerns.)
Tepco has promised to increase pay to make up for the risky and unstable
nature of the work. Still, workers eating dinner at a dormitory near the
plant were skeptical, especially over whether they would receive any
extra money.
“Once the many levels of contractors skim off their share, there’s not
very much left for us,” one worker in his 40s said, as he and two
colleagues washed down a simple meal of chicken, eggplant and rice with
beer and whiskey.
Each of the men — who feared being fired if their names were used — were
housed in tiny rooms with a bed and a desk. The area around the
dormitory is mainly deserted since many people refused to move back
after the accident.
Workers say there is little to do at night other than watch TV, play
roulette at a tiny game center, and drink. A store inside “J-Village” —
Tepco’s base outside the plant — sells beer, whiskey and sake. According
to several accounts, alcoholism is rampant, and one worker said he and
his colleagues sometimes showed up for work hung over.
Struggling to maintain 3,000 workers at the plant — compared with 4,500
at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant — labor brokers are getting desperate.
Mostly chased away by labor activists from urban areas where day
laborers and homeless people congregate, the brokers have increasingly
taken their pleas online and made clear their standards are low.
One ad, for work involving radiation monitoring, said, “You must have
common sense, and be able to carry out a conversation.”
Although it is unclear if any workers were living on the streets before
they came to the plant, laborers and others familiar with the work force
say many people there are living on the edge.
“We’re talking people who are basically living hand-to-mouth.” said
Hiroyuki Watanabe, a City Council member in nearby Iwaki.
One worker who refused to give his name said he was already so
vulnerable that he ended up homeless when he lost his job cleaning
contaminated mud off workers’ boots. Another, hired to check for cracks
at the plant’s reactors, said he arrived after losing his factory job
and losing a place to live when he broke up with his girlfriend.
The labor broker he said that he worked with, a company called Takahashi
Kensetsu, did not ask about his credentials.
He says he was often unsure what he was checking for on the reactors,
and received little explanation of potential hazards. After his pay was
delayed and he was denied overtime, he quit. He has since won some back
pay with help from the local labor standards office.
Takahashi Kensetsu had disappeared by then — empty beer cans and comic
books littered its empty offices during a recent visit — so the labor
advocates got the money from the contractor that hired the broker.
Takahashi Kensetsu could not be found in an official local business
registry, and repeated calls to the number listed in its ad rang with no
answer.
Other contractors in Fukushima and labor activists, say Takahashi
Kensetsu is affiliated with a local chapter of Inagawa-kai, one of
Japan’s largest organized crime groups, or yakuza. Workers, contractors
and lawyers say the yakuza has long been involved in providing workers
to nuclear plants, and at least one contractor penalized over labor-law
abuses at Fukushima was identified by the police as having ties to the
yakuza.
“Tokyo Electric has no idea who’s really handling the job on the
ground,” said Takeshi Katsura, who helped the worker win back pay. “It’s
a free-for-all.”
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