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

[bananas]

http://www.reuters.com/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

<snip>

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.

<snip>

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 Japan's 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.

<snip>

Japan's 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.

<snip>

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.

<snip>

Yousuke Minaguchi, a lawyer who has represented Fukushima workers, says Japan's government has turned a blind eye to the problem of worker exploitation. "On the surface, they say it is illegal. But in reality they don't want to do anything. By not punishing anyone, they can keep using a lot of workers cheaply."

<snip>

[chervilant]

1. I find it disheartening that

TEPCO is charged with the responsibility of cleaning up this catastrophe -- AND that so little information is promulgated by the M$M.

Are people too overwhelmed by the likely outcome? Do most of us have a severe case of NIMBY?

Even here, there are too few threads concerned with our nation's lack of response to Fukushima. The recent thread on word "Clouds" was a glaring example of how infrequently we discuss this crisis.