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Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters
By Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito
Tetsuya Hayashi, former worker in Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Tokyo July 10, 2013. REUTERS-Toru Hanai
Tetsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks.
Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima’s hottest radiation zones.
He was told he would have to wear an oxygen tank and a double-layer protective suit. Even then, his handlers told him, the radiation would be so high it could burn through his annual exposure limit in just under an hour.
“I felt cheated and entrapped,” Hayashi said. “I had not agreed to any of this.”
When Hayashi took his grievances to a firm on the next rung up the ladder of Fukushima contractors, he says he was fired. He filed a complaint but has not received any response from labor regulators for more than a year. All the eight companies involved, including embattled plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, declined to comment or could not be reached for comment on his case.
Source: http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2013/10/special-report-help-wanted-in-fukushima-low-pay-high-risks-and-gangsters/
