That grim posting is one of the starkest indications yet of an increasingly troubled search for workers willing to carry out the hazardous decommissioning at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant.

The plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., known as TEPCO, has been shifting its attention away, leaving the complex clean-up to an often badly managed, poorly trained, demoralised and sometimes unskilled work force. 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 disaster.

Regulators, contractors and more than 20 current and former workers interviewed in recent months say the deteriorating labour 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.

“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 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. Worse yet, the labourers were not warned that a hose near the one they would be removing was filled with water laced with radioactive caesium.

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.

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.

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…….. Struggling to maintain 3000 workers at the plant – compared with 4500 at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant – labour brokers are getting desperate. Mostly chased away by labour activists from urban areas where day labourers 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.””Tokyo Electric has no idea who’s really handling the job on the ground,” said Takeshi Katsura, who helped one worker win back pay. “It’s a free-for-all.” http://www.theage.com.au/world/unskilled-recruited-for-fukushima-duty-20140318-hvk08.html