by SUVENDRINI KAKUCHI
The Fukushima disaster has thrown up the first opportunity in decades to bring justice to thousands of unskilled workers who risk radioactive contamination to keep Japan’s nuclear power plants running.
“Fukushima has created public awareness on a section of nuclear workers castigated as ‘radiation- exposed people’ but forming the dark underbelly of an industry that depends on them,” says Minoru Nasu, spokesperson for the Japan Day Labourers Union.
Nasu, a long-time labour activist, says that while nuclear industry relies heavily on unskilled workers it has left it to thuggish subcontractors to marshal them as daily wagers.
The common practice for the past several decades can best be described as “human auctioning,” Nasu told IPS. Labourers gather at the crack of dawn at designated places such as public parks to be picked up by toughs who take them to the nuclear plants.
According to figures available with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s regulator, of the 80,0000-odd workers at Japan’s 18 commercial nuclear power plants, 80 percent are contract workers. At the Fukushima plant, 89 percent of the 10,000 workers in 2010 were on contract.
The men are given contracts to do unskilled, dangerous work inside nuclear plants for months together. There are no guarantees in the event of an accident, or long-term health insurance against such diseases as leukaemia or other forms of cancer which may surface years after exposure to radiation.
“When their work is completed, they are expected to simply disappear. Nobody cares about them,” said Nasu.
IPS for more