Fukushima’s disposable workers

WHEN THE 9.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan on March 11, Masayuki Ishizawa ran from the room near the Number 3 reactor where he and a group of workers had been doing repair work on the central gate.

But rather than being allowed out of the plant immediately--despite the near-certainty that a tsunami was on the way--a security guard demanded to know where Ishizawa's supervisors were and told him that he and others attempting to flee the plant had to follow the correct sign-out procedure.

"What are you saying?" Ishizawa shouted at the guard, according to a New York Times report. "He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark shadow on the horizon, out at sea, he said. He shouted again: 'Don't you know a tsunami is coming?'"

As the Times article continued:

Mr. Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he is not even an employee of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the crippled plant. He is one of thousands of untrained, itinerant, temporary laborers who handle the bulk of the dangerous work at nuclear power plants here and in other countries, lured by the higher wages offered for working with radiation. Collectively, these contractors were exposed to levels of radiation about 16 times as high as the levels faced by Tokyo Electric employees last year, according to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which regulates the industry.

In the weeks since the beginning of the Fukushima crisis, the bulk of the media attention has focused on the severity of the disaster, the continued efforts to repair the damaged nuclear facility, and the amount of radioactive material leaking from the site and polluting surrounding areas.

But less notice has been paid to the operations at the plant prior to the earthquake, including the fact that the workers responsible for some of the most dangerous jobs at the facility--some of the most dangerous jobs in all of Japan--were contract laborers who were paid the same hourly wage as workers at a Tokyo McDonald's.

THE FUKUSHIMA nightmare is far from over. On April 12, Japanese authorities announced that they had reclassified the Fukushima crisis as a "Level 7" on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale--the highest level possible, signifying a "major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects." The day before, officials finally expanded the 12-mile evacuation radius around the plant to 19 miles--though many experts believe this expanded zone is still far short of what's needed.

Thousands of tons of radioactive wastewater has been dumped into the ocean near Fukushima, and although an earlier leak was reportedly plugged, a spike in the level of radioactive iodine in seawater on April 16 caused concern that the plant may have sprung a new one. The government said the radioactive iodine levels were 6,500 times the legal limit, up from 1,100 on April 15.

Currently, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) officials are suggesting that it could take nine months before the plant is brought back under full control--three months to reduce radiation and restore the plant's cooling systems, and another three to six months to stabilize the reactors and completely stem the radiation.

This, it should be pointed out, is a best-case scenario and does not take into account potential problems caused by new equipment failures, radioactive leaks or even the very real possibility of more damage resulting from one of the many aftershocks that continue to hit the area more than a month after the initial quake.

But amid this further bad news, new questions are arising about the conditions for workers at Fukushima, both before the catastrophe hit and today.

The Fukushima plant is located in an area known as the Tohoku region, where, according to Bloomberg News, "[a]lmost 28,000 people are dead or missing and 150,000 are homeless...[and] where 25 percent of the population is 65 or older and job seekers outnumber jobs by two-to-one."

The lack of employment has led to desperate job seekers taking on the bulk of work at Fukushima as "contract laborers." According to the New York Times, this is par for the course in the Japanese nuclear industry:

Of roughly 83,000 workers at Japan's 18 commercial nuclear power plants, 88 percent were contract workers in the year that ended in March 2010, the nuclear agency said. At the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, 89 percent of the 10,303 workers during that period were contractors. In Japan's nuclear industry, the elite are operators like Tokyo Electric and the manufacturers that build and help maintain the plants like Toshiba and Hitachi. But under those companies are contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors--with wages, benefits and protection against radiation dwindling with each step down the ladder.

According to a December 1999 article in the Los Angeles Times, "It is these employees who receive more than 90 percent of all radiation exposure."

In a rational world, workers in a dangerous industry like nuclear power would make decent wages, have full benefits (especially medical coverage) and be protected by rigorous safety standards and protocols. And since Japan is frequently touted as a model for how nuclear power can be "done right," you might expect nuclear workers would get better treatment. But as Bloomberg News recently noted:

A week before becoming ground zero for the world's biggest nuclear crisis since 1986, the Fukushima-Daiichi plant offered $11 an hour for full-time maintenance work in an area of Japan that was lagging even before last month's earthquake and tsunami struck.

The wage, the same as McDonald's Corp. pays for part-time work in Tokyo, shows the scale of the northern Tohoku region's economic blight and indicates towns may never recover from the disaster.

MUCH HAS been made of the heroic efforts of the rotating crew of some 300 workers still at Fukushima, who are working to prevent the disaster from escalating since the earthquake and tsunami.

While a group of around 50 engineers works inside a heavily shielded building on site, the remainder of the workforce is, according to Britain's Observer:

drawn from a pool of semi-skilled labor who work for low wages. Many work for associated companies such as Hitachi...Toshiba and Toden Kogyo. Between shifts, they are housed in a football stadium, J-Village, within the expanded [19-mile] evacuation zone and brought in by bus.

A number were seasonal workers, using a job at the plant to supplement livelihoods as small farmers. Some...have been hopping between jobs at nuclear plants for years.

Even before the crisis at Fukushima, workers spoke of the dangerous conditions they endured. According to the Times, their jobs included cleaning radioactive waste from reactors and spent fuel pools using mops and rags, and filling drums with nuclear waste.

The workers, according to journalist Tim Shorrock, are referred to as "genpatsu gypsies" (nuclear gypsies) "because they often travel from plant to plant as needs for their services rise and fall. Their stories make some of the saddest tales of all in the Japanese nuclear industry."

According to the Times, "In the most dangerous places, current and former workers said, radiation levels would be so high that workers would take turns approaching a valve just to open it, turning it for a few seconds before a supervisor with a stopwatch ordered the job to be handed off to the next person."

Last October, one contract worker who had been wiping down a turbine building was exposed to harmful levels of radiation after accidentally using one of the towels to wipe the sweat from his face.

"Your first priority is to avoid pan-ku," one current worker at the Fukushima-Daini plant (located about 6 miles from Fukushima-Daiichi), told the New York Times. "Pan-ku," the Times explained, is a "Japanese expression based on the English word puncture. Workers use the term to describe their dosimeter, which measures radiation exposure, from reaching the daily cumulative limit of 50 millisieverts. 'Once you reach the limit, there is no more work,' said the worker, who did not want to give his name for fear of being fired by his employer."

Since the mid-1970s, the Times notes, some 50 former workers have received workers' compensation after developing leukemia and other forms of cancer. But the real number of those poisoned is almost undoubtedly higher--since it's often impossible to definitively link workers' illnesses to radiation exposure.

Shorrock, for example, cites a book reviewed in a 1980 issue of AMPO magazine in which journalist Horie Kunio detailed his experiences working as a contract laborer at Fukushima and other nuclear plants. According to AMPO, Kunio's book detailed how the work of contract laborers:

includes washing work uniforms which have been contaminated with radiation; mopping up radioactive water; scraping out shells and sludge attached to drains; inspection and repairing, mainly removing radioactive dust from the hundreds of parts inside the reactors. These operations are carried out in a small hole surrounded by radioactivity where workers can hardly move, and the workers are often not able to leave to go to the toilet during these operations...At the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant of Kansai Electric Power Co., where Horie used to work, a worker is required to apologize to the parent company if he gets injured.

But because of the lack of jobs in the region and fears about speaking out, contract laborers are almost entirely at the mercy of plant management, and have little recourse if they witness safety violations or are injured on the job.

The Times spoke with Tetsuen Nakajima, who helped found Japan's first union for nuclear day laborers in the early 1980s. Among the demands that the union made of operators was keeping accurate records of radiation exposures (instead of forging them) and not forcing workers to lie to government inspectors about safety procedures.

But as the Times notes, the union was soon violently busted: "Although more than 180 workers belonged to the union at its peak, its leaders were soon visited by thugs who kicked down their doors and threatened to harm their families, he said. 'They were not allowed to speak up,' Mr. Nakajima said. 'Once you enter a nuclear power plant, everything's a secret.'"

ALL THIS begs the question: Are the "nuclear gypsies" at Fukushima today being similarly forced to risk their lives?

Since the tsunami, at least 20 workers have already been exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation--including three who, last month, suffered burns after stepping into highly radioactive water.

But many of the contract laborers working at Fukushima now were reportedly lured back by increased pay, despite the potential health consequences and poor job conditions.

According to Kyodo News, as of March 29, workers at the plant were working in one-week shifts. On a given day, they were given just two bottles of water and two small meals (made up largely of dried rice and a can of either chicken or fish), and they were forced to sleep under lead-lined sheets in hallways and conference rooms that are not entirely shielded from radiation exposure.

Although every worker at the plant is supposed to have their own dosimeter to measure exposure to radiation, as Slate.com's William Saletan noted, "[A]fter the tsunami, TEPCO couldn't find enough functioning dosimeters on hand. So it sent out work teams with a single dosimeter to cover multiple workers." In addition, the Japanese government has quintupled the maximum level of radiation that workers can be exposed to in a day--from 50 millisieverts to 250 millisieverts. According to Kyodo News, "The increase was requested to enable workers to engage in longer hours of assignments and to secure more workers who meet the restriction."

As Saletan wrote, "To put it crudely, TEPCO and the Japanese government have calculated how far safety standards must be lowered and how much money must be offered to deploy enough humans to clean up Fukushima."

While the media continues to focus on the "natural disasters" that caused Japan's nuclear crisis, for Fukushima's nuclear gypsies, their jobs always carried tremendous risk--even in what is supposedly the safest and most technologically advanced nuclear industry in the world.

Before another Fukushima is allowed to happen, we should ask whether the risks to human lives--not only in surrounding communities, but to the workers who make nuclear plants run--is worth it.