Despite all the misery, nuclear facility vital part of people’s lives Part 2

A former fisherman who ended up working full-time at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant harbors mixed feelings about his job choice.

Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on conditions that contract workers face at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

* * *

For those living in coastal areas of Fukushima Prefecture, the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is a bit like the proverbial elephant in the living room, in that it looms large in their lives.

Although the plant unleashed untold havoc five years ago, many people find it unsettling to badmouth the site to which they have owed their economic well-being–even after the disaster.

Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s sprawling nuclear complex provided them with coveted employment that made the difference between making do and doing without in an otherwise depressed local economy.

One local resident, a onetime fisherman, summed up the thoughts of people in the area by saying: “You cannot deny having a sense of gratitude if you have lived in this coastal region. It is not a question of like or dislike.”

Born in a community close to the crash of waves, the man aspired from an early age to become a fisherman.

He loved the sea so much that he even stopped attending high school for several months to work on a boat trawling for Pacific saury.

He eventually quit high school to make his living by fishing full-time.

Local fishermen can be away from home for months at a time, traveling to distant parts of the globe and danger. The longest time the man had been away was 10 months.

He recalled fishing for squid off Argentina shortly after the Falkland War ended in 1982 and witnessing a ship coming under fire and sinking because the vessel had intruded into the country’s territorial waters.

He began a stint at the Fukushima plant in around 1972, about a year after the plant opened. Although he was a full-time fisherman, the man sought to supplement his income when it was off-season for fishing.

As prices for fish continued to stagnate, he eventually quit fishing altogether in 1989 to become a full-time worker at the Fukushima plant.

Ever since, his life revolved around his work at the site–until the disaster triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

After a break of a couple of months in the aftermath of the triple meltdown, the man returned to the plant to work on ventilation equipment at a reactor building.

He was hired by a construction company based near the crippled facility.

Back in the 1970s, the man recalled that subcontractors were lax about the handling of radioactive materials.

“Workers did not follow the set rules as strictly as today,” he said.

They occasionally disposed of pipes and other radioactive waste generated at reactor buildings manually, although they were expected to use a machine for the task.

His responsibility also involved checking pipes for cracks.

To detect a flaw in piping, it was a standard procedure then, as it is now, to conduct a liquid penetrant test.

Workers paint pipes with a red solution and wipe them after a while.

The penetrant remains inside the damaged parts. Workers then coat the pipes with “developing fluid,” which is a mixture of highly volatile liquid such as thinner and some sort of white powder.

Red stains left in the flawed sections emerge in the process so that workers can identify parts that need to be repaired.

However, they would skip making needed repairs when they feared they would not be able to meet the deadline for the work they had been assigned to do.

“We deliberately did not paint red penetrant to the parts that we knew were damaged,” he recalled.

The man said his crew had no choice.

“The contractor told us to make out a report for all the mistakes we made, but we knew we would be better off not doing so because we would be certainly slapped with a penalty for the errors we would have reported,” he said. “As long as the nature of relations between a contractor and a subcontractor remained that of a higher and lower rung of a pyramid, attempts to cover up oversight were bound to continue.”

When the magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck, the man was in the basement of a reactor building.

An inspection was under way at the time to check whether the replacement of parts he had just finished was done properly.

The man heard metallic clanks from a floor above as if two huge objects had collided with each other.

He was desperate to flee right away, but could not. The stairs were shaking so violently that he was unable to climb them. The man was only able to climb ladders and reach safety after the vibrations had subsided.

Ensuing tsunami swept into the compound, but did not reach the office where he took refuge.

He managed to return home that night.

Later, he learned that the last people to leave the plant were engineers who handled valves.

These were the men who knew exactly which direction water will flow when a particular pipe valve was opened.

“All of us hired by a contractor and subcontractors remained on-site after the other workers had left,” a valve engineer told him.

The man returned to work at the plant around May 2011.

The company initially stated that the men would not have to work at the plant. But one day, the president of the company summoned them to a canteen and apologetically told them they had to.

“It is far from my intention to accept work at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, but I would be out of a job if we refused,” he said. “I am sorry to have to say this, but I registered you as reserve workers for the plant.”

The president said executives of a contractor had assembled the presidents of subcontractors to ask them to secure manpower for the plant.

One of the presidents demanded an extra allowance for the radiation risks in return.

“The current terms and conditions are unacceptable,” the president said. “We request you provide more hazard pay.”

Then one of the executives of the contractor declared: “We will not partner with a subcontractor that puts money first.”

Some subcontractors went along with the contractor, including the man’s company, while others refused.

When he was a full-time fisherman, the man and his peers were opposed to the plant.

“We believed that warm, discharged water from the plant would cause a change in the ecosystem in waters nearby,” he said.

Still, it was the nuclear power plant that provided him with a job to make a living over nearly four decades.

“Subcontractors have heavily relied on work at the plant as a source of their revenues before and even after the accident,” he said. “Thanks to the contracts with the plant, some companies grew into larger ones and others succeeded in improving their technological skills.”

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604060001.html

April 11, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Fukushima Daiichi, Tepco, Workers | Leave a comment

Braving danger and radiation for chance to earn 11,000 yen a day Part 1

A one-year contract signed by a man from Nagano Prefecture and a subcontractor for the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Part of the image was modified for privacy reasons.

Editor’s note: An army of workers, 6,000 or so, battles daily on the front line of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant to get the site ready for the decades-long process of decommissioning the reactors.

An overwhelming majority of the men are hired by subcontractors and endure low pay, fragile job security and hazardous working conditions. Radiation exposure is a constant risk.

This three-part series is intended to shed light on conditions at the plant and how the people working there feel about their jobs.

***

It is winter and still dark when the man awakes at 3:30 a.m. to start his working day. He begins by putting on five layers of clothing under his protective gear, and dons two pairs of gloves and socks, the insides of which are stuffed with disposable hand warmers.

But even then, the 36-year-old native of Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, is cold.

Thirty minutes later, a cutting breeze blows from the ocean as the man climbs into a car ordered by his employer to take him to the J-Village facility, where the workers board buses to transport them to the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant 20 kilometers away. The man’s job is to lay pipes containing contaminated water at the complex. He works for a fourth-tier subcontractor with Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the plant.

Five years after the triple meltdown, the plant premises are much tidier than in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Today, the ground is covered with steel sheets.

However, the steel frames of the reactor buildings still stand exposed because the concrete walls were blown out in hydrogen explosions triggered by the overheating of reactor cores.

Inevitably, jobs near the reactor buildings pose radiation risks.

“The closer you get to the reactor buildings, the higher the radiation readings,” the man said. He is required to carry a dosimeter whenever he is on-site.

Each time the man’s dose climbs by 0.16 millisievert, an alarm sounds. If the alarm goes off three times in a single shift, he must stop what he is doing, no matter what work remains to be done.

With a full-face mask and protective gear, working in summer months can be more grueling–and even life-threatening.

He packs ice cubes under his clothes to keep cool, but they melt within 30 minutes.

One summer day, he saw a middle-aged man lying on the floor of a lounge where the workers congregate during their break.

The man had collapsed after the end of his shift. Although the individual was airlifted to a hospital by helicopter, he apparently died of heatstroke.

When the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake struck, the Iwaki man was working inside the No. 1 reactor building. The power went out and in the darkness he heard a loud crashing noise, as if a piece of equipment had suddenly ground to a halt.

He fled the building as fast as he could.

Fissures dotted the concrete surface of the ground and shards of glass were everywhere.

The man took refuge in a structure in the compound known as the “company building.”

A roll call was taken to check that everybody was safe, and then he and his colleagues were dismissed in the evening.

The Iwaki man did not recall seeing the effects of the tsunami on his way home, which he reached at 8 p.m. By that time, he was running a fever and itched all over his body, probably the result of a stressful and nerve-racking day.

A hydrogen explosion rocked the No. 1 reactor building the following day, March 12.

Several days later, the man and his family evacuated to Nagoya, where he has relatives.

But around May, the president of the company he had worked for called and asked him to consider returning to the plant.

After giving the matter some thought, the Iwaki man accepted. His daughter had just turned 1 year old. He had a family to raise. Leaving his family behind, the man returned to Fukushima for a job that pays 11,000 yen ($97) a day.

ANOTHER MAN’S STORY

A 44-year-old man from Nagano Prefecture landed a short-term position at the plant in 2012 after scouring job ads online.

“I wanted to help contain the spread of radioactive contamination,” said the man, who previously worked in a local car dealership.

Shortly after replying to the ad, he was contacted by a subcontractor.

“We have a job to measure workers’ radiation levels,” the man was told. “It does not entail exposure to high levels of radiation.”

Relieved, the man headed to Iwaki and signed a one-year contract with a company that called itself a fourth-tier subcontractor.

But when he attended a briefing held by a first-tier subcontractor several days later, he learned that the initial job description was far different from what he had just been told.

“As you know, you will be working in an area where radiation levels are high. That’s because the mixers for contaminated water are there,” the official said. “You will be able to stay in the area for five to 10 minutes, no longer.”

The official added that the men would not be involved in replacing the mixers themselves as that is done by veteran workers.

What he and the others were required to do was lay rubber mats on the floor to lower those workers’ radiation exposure to enable them to stay longer.

He was also told that workers have to carry breathing apparatus on their backs.

The Nagano man, upset by what he had just learned about the job, protested to the president of the fourth-tier subcontractor afterward.

“It would be impossible for me to continue with this job as long as for a year if I had such a high level of radiation dose,” he said. “This is not what I signed up for.”

The president tried to appease him.

“Even if you had a reading of 1 millisievert a day, it would halve in a week,” the president said. “If you quit at this stage, the company’s reputation would be jeopardized.”

As it happened, the assignment involving high radiation risks was canceled at the last minute.

Instead, the workers were required to clear the glass shards in the compound.

During a break on the first day of his job, in June 2012, he struck up a conversation with a regular employee of a first-tier subcontractor.

“Would you allow your son to work in a job that gives out several millisieverts of exposure a day?” he asked the middle-aged man.

The employee replied: “It will not be a problem legally, but I would not (send my son to do that kind of work).”

On his way back to his lodgings, the president of the fourth-tier subcontractor called him. He was told to stop by at the office of a third-tier subcontractor.

When he showed up, he was met by someone he didn’t know.

“What you said at the work site gave us problems,” the stranger said. “You do not need to come to work anymore.”

After arguing with the official, the man returned to Nagano Prefecture three days later.

Later, he noticed his bank account had been credited to the tune of 24,000 yen, reflecting what was left over from several days of wages after accommodation costs had been deducted.

The man said he still has no idea at what point the original assignment to measure radiation doses was switched to one that was, without question, dangerous.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604050034.html

April 11, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Fukushima Daiichi, Tepco, Workers | Leave a comment

Cheated every step of the way: a raw deal from subcontractors Part 3

Two types of monthly paychecks a man in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, received. The payslip issued by a waterworks company in January 2015, right, stated the company paid him 236,828 yen. A cleaning company’s hand-written pay details mention the sum of 204,328 yen. Parts of the images were modified for privacy reasons.

Editor’s note: This is the last installment of a three-part series on conditions that contract workers face at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

* * *

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

And that sums up what contract workers are facing, having signed up for jobs to clean up the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

These men are positioned near the bottom of a pyramid of a multilayered hiring system, and get shunted off to dangerous work on the ground–often without due compensation.

One man who quit working at the plant last October was simply fed up with being shortchanged, especially as the work he did was potentially hazardous to his health.

“My pay was doubly skimmed off,” said the 27-year-old, who is from Iwaki in the prefecture.

The man’s case seems to be anything but exceptional because of a hiring system at the plant in which layers of subcontractors often skim off their shares as they assign work to companies below them.

The man signed on with a cleaning company in late 2012 to do decontamination work in Naraha, a stricken town near the plant. There was no written contract for his employment, just a verbal arrangement.

Then in March 2014, the cleaning company referred him to a “better-paying job” at the plant and asked him to sign a contract with a local waterworks company for the assignment.

His written contract with the waterworks company stated that his daily wage would be 15,500 yen ($137).

But the cleaning company, from which the man received his pay for work performed on behalf of the waterworks firm, told him that he would actually get 2,500 yen less than promised. It cited “miscellaneous expenses.”

“Our company cannot continue to operate without funds,” said an official with the cleaning company by way of explaining the discrepancy.

The cleaning company took possession of the man’s bank passbook and seal, and withdrew all the money the waterworks company paid into his bank account.

The cleaning company handed him a monthly salary in cash that was calculated on the basis of 13,000 yen per day.

He was also given two payslips: one stating a salary based on a daily wage of 15,500 yen and the other for 13,000 yen.

After working at the plant for 18 months or so, the man learned that he was being gypped more than he had realized. What the waterworks company actually paid to the cleaning company as his monthly salary was computed on the basis of a daily wage of 20,000 yen.

When he confronted the cleaning company, an official was evasive.

“It was a referral fee,” the official said of the gap. “We will raise your salary.”

Growing distrustful, the man quit the cleaning company in October.

In an interview with The Asahi Shimbun, a female representative at the cleaning company said it had never engaged in fraudulent activities.

“It is true that we kept his bank passbook,” she said. “We did it to withdraw money on his behalf since he could not go to the bank on pay day due to work.”

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. announced it was doubling hazard pay to 20,000 yen a day in November 2013 to help bolster morale among workers and secure manpower.

The problem is that TEPCO pays the contractors directly, so whether the money actually trickles down to subcontractors–and contract workers they employ–is a separate issue.

In the case of the Iwaki man, his payslip prepared by the waterworks company showed 7,000 yen in hazard pay out of the daily wage of 15,500 yen.

The hand-written slip created by the cleaning company, however, did not have an entry for danger allowance.

Still, the man was involved in work that carried radiation risks, and, in his opinion, with less than adequate protection.

His job at the plant was to install fire hydrants. Radiation readings on the dosimeters that workers were required to carry climbed as his work progressed because the water pipes for hydrants are extended toward the reactor buildings.

Although technicians working near the reactor buildings donned lead vests to shield themselves from radiation, the man had to make do with only protective suits.

On one occasion, his dosimeter started beeping loudly as he approached a reactor building. “Flee!” his boss shouted.

“My work was dangerous,” said the man. “I find it totally unacceptable that my pay was comparable to the money paid for a cleanup assignment.”

Tsuguo Hirota, a lawyer from Fukushima Prefecture who has been involved in lawsuits over back pay of hazard and other allowances for contract workers, said the multitiered hiring system at the plant is at the heart of the problem.

“If the system to repeatedly outsource work to subcontractors were not altered, the practice of skimming off (workers’ salaries) would still be continuing,” he said.

In one case, he said a leading construction company paid a daily wage of 43,000 yen per employee. But all a worker at a third-tier subcontractor ended up with was 11,500 yen.

On the other hand, the skimming of salaries is no longer a widespread practice in the cleanup operation commissioned by the Environment Ministry, although it was the case in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 triple meltdown.

When the ministry places an order with a contractor, its deal includes a clause requiring that designated hazard pay must be paid to workers hired by subcontractors.

But no similar arrangements have been made at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

Other problems inherent in a multilayered hiring system center on ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of contract workers at the plant and tracking their accumulative radiation exposure over a long period.

When the Iwaki man worked at the plant, he received instructions from the waterworks company, a third-tier subcontractor, on how to perform his tasks. But a second-tier subcontractor and the cleaning company also told him how to do his job, which could have been unlawful.

According to a TEPCO survey last autumn, 14.2 percent of respondents, or 465 workers, said the company that pays their wages is different from the one that gives direction on how to do the job.

Takeshi Katsura, a staff member of the Fukushima nuclear power plant workers’ consultation center, a private group in Iwaki, urged subcontractors to have a greater sense of responsibility for their workers.

“Even five years after the accident, some are working on a mere verbal arrangement,” he said. “A company that concluded a contract with workers should responsibly oversee their wages, safety, social security programs and other work-related matters.”

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604070003.html

April 11, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Fukushima Daiichi, Tepco, Workers | Leave a comment