Contractors in Fukushima exploit down-and-out workers

I recently received an e-mail from a PR manager at Thomas Reuters about contractors in Fukushima exploiting workers involved in the decontamination of the areas around Tepco’s crippled nuclear reactor. Workers here are coerced into working for low wages for contractors six-times removed from Tepco, the utility responsible for the cleanup, some of which have ties to organized crime and skim one-third off the top of the employees’ wages. The full report can be read here: “Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters.”

I’d heard about contractors recruiting employees for low wages to work in the decontamination in the early days after the disaster, but I had no idea the problem had escalated to such extremes as reported in the linked article. I’ll summarize a few of the highlights from the report, then give my take on the problem.

Basically, hundreds of small subcontractors provide employees to the cleanup in Fukushima. Tepco is unable to oversee all these companies, some of which are six times removed from the utility. Therefore, there is ample opportunities for the yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicates, to exploit workers and inherent weaknesses in the system. For example, the firms hire the homeless and desperate men from the ranks of the working poor–workers who are reluctant to complain about abuses because they are afraid of losing their jobs. They also lock some employees in by paying off their debts in advance, so the worker is basically forced into an indentured servant kind of relationship with the firm. Adding to the abuse, many firms embezzle a third of the workers’ wages and don’t pay them the government-mandated $100 per day hazard pay. The employees are poorly trained and not given adequate protection from the radiation. Tepco and the larger contractors have written rules against working with the yakuza, but these are barely enforced.

I think these problems will be difficult (read “nearly impossible”) to eradicate due to the use of middlemen and paying one’s debts to chain them into a job have precedents in Japanese culture.

Japan employs a vast number of middlemen in nearly every sector of the economy. This is one of the common barriers foreign businesses have to deal with when they try to enter the Japanese market, as they lack relationships with such middlemen and find them unnecessary. The number of middlemen taking cuts at every level is one factor contributing to the sky-high prices in Japan. It’s an incredibly inefficient system that needs to be done away with. Foreigners living in Japan often scratch their heads as to how the Japanese have earned such a reputation for efficiency. Japan gives an appearance of efficiency in that almost everything on the surface appears to be perfectly executed. Americans take for granted a level of sloppiness that would be unacceptable in Japan. However, the numbers don’t corroborate the reputation for efficiency. Japan ranks number 20 in gross domestic product normalized to purchasing power parities, a common measure of a country’s efficiency, behind Spain (18) and Italy (19)–two notoriously inefficient economies. (The U.S. ranks third, behind Luxembourg and Norway.) Despite the inefficiency of the system, it still receives a lot of support from Japanese politicians. Flimsy excuses for resisting change include, “This is Japan–this is the way it’s always been done,” “Normal people don’t understand how to do things on their own, so they need a middleman to handle everything for them,” and “Even though it’s inefficient and expensive, it provides too many jobs to be gotten rid of.” Even though there would be initial unemployment getting rid of this system of middlemen, the more efficient economy would be able to absorb these workers. However, this problem has been pointed out for decades, so I won’t hold my breath for things to change anytime soon.

The practice of debts being paid to trap a person into a job has long been used in the “water business” (e.g. sex industry) back to the heydays of the geisha. I haven’t heard about it being used in other sectors, but according to the Reuters article, this is being done in Fukushima today. Again, as it is rooted in Japanese custom, it is hard to eradicate, especially since the victims of the practice typically don’t come forward out of fear.

Given this labor situation at Fukushima, this recent story is even more disturbing: “Fuel Removal From Fukushima’s Reactor 4 Threatens ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenario.'”

Tepco is planning to extract 1,300 spent fuel rods whose radiation matches “14,000 Hiroshima bombs” from a sinking plant. This is a highly complicated procedure that has never been attempted before. I’ve noted before Tepco isn’t capable of handling the nuclear crisis on its own. The company has screwed up too many times to count, and has been criticized for its lack of transparency and covering up its mistakes. What’s worse, Tepco plans to rush the job to complete it in fiscal 2014. This job really requires experts from all over the globe with international oversight. While I found the Common Dreams article I linked above to be a little alarmist in tone, its clear a failure to extract these rods could have devastating global consequences.