While Tokyo Electric Power Company
(TEPCO) experiences difficulties in recruiting
workers willing to go to Fukushima to clean up the
damaged reactors, the World Health Organization
(WHO) is planning to conduct an epidemiological
survey on the catastrophe. This is the first of
two reports offering a worker-centered analysis of
the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
In the
titanic struggle to bring to closure the dangerous
situation at Fukushima Nuclear Plant No1, there
are many signs that TEPCO is facing great
difficulties in finding workers. At present, there
are nearly 700 people at the site. As in ordinary
times, workers rotate so as to limit the
cumulative dose of radiation inherent in
maintenance and cleanup work at the nuclear site. But
this time, the risks are
greater, and the method of recruitment unusual.
Job offers come not from TEPCO but from
Mizukami Kogyo, a company whose business is
construction and cleaning maintenance. The
description indicates only that the work is at a
nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture. The job is
specified as three hours per day at an hourly wage
of 10,000 yen (about US$122). There is no
information about danger, only the suggestion to
ask the employer for further details on food,
lodging, transportation and insurance.
Those who answer these offers may have
little awareness of the dangers and they are
likely to have few other job opportunities. A rate
of $122 an hour is hardly a king's ransom given
the risk of cancer from high radiation levels. But
TEPCO and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency
(NISA) keep diffusing their usual propaganda to
minimize the radiation risks.
Rumor has it
that many of the cleanup workers are
burakumin (a minority group dating from
Japan's feudal era and still often associated with
discrimination). This cannot be verified, but it
would be congruent with the logic of the nuclear
industry and the difficult job situation of day
laborers. Because of ostracism, some
burakumin are also involved with
yakuza, or organized crime groups.
Therefore, it would not be surprising that
yakuza-burakumin recruit other
burakumin to go to Fukushima. Yakuza are
active in recruiting day laborers of the
yoseba (communities for day laborers):
Sanya in Tokyo, Kotobukicho in Yokohama, and
Kamagasaki in Osaka. People who live in precarious
conditions are then exposed to high levels of
radiation, doing the most dirty and dangerous jobs
in the nuclear plants, then are sent back to the
yoseba. Those who fall ill will not even
appear in the statistics. [1]
Before
the catastrophe ... According to data
published by NISA, in 2009, there were 1,108
regular employees (seisha'in at Fukushima
NP1. These were TEPCO employees, but may also
include some employees from General Electric or
Toshiba, Hitachi and Mitsubishi. But the vast
majority of those working at Fukushima 1 were
9,195 contract laborers (hiseisha'in).
These contract employees or temporary
workers were provided by subcontracting companies:
they range from rank and file workers who carry
out the dirtiest and most dangerous tasks - the
nuclear gypsies described in Horie Kunio's 1979
book Nuclear Gypsy and Higuchi Kenji's
photographic reports - to highly qualified
technicians who supervise maintenance operations.
So even within this category, there is
much discrepancy in working conditions, wages and
welfare depending on position in the hierarchy of
subcontracted tasks. What is clear is that the
contract laborers are routinely exposed to the
highest level of radiation: in 2009 according to
NISA, of those who received a dose between 5 and
10 millisieverts (mSv), there were 671 contract
laborers against 36 regular employees. Those who
received between 10 and 15 mSv were comprised of
220 contract laborers and two regular workers,
while 35 contract workers and no regular workers
were exposed to a dose between 15 and 20 mSv.
Since contract laborers move from one
nuclear plant to another, depending on the
maintenance schedule of the various reactors, they
lack access to their individual cumulative dose
for one year or for many years. NISA compiles only
the cumulative dose for each nuclear plant. The
result is that the whole system is opaque, thus
complicating the procedure for workers who need to
apply for occupational hazards compensation.
... and after On March 14, three
days after the earthquake and tsunami that caused
the damage at Fukushima, the Ministry of Health
and Labor raised the maximum dose for workers to
250 mSv a year, where previously it was set at 100
mSv over five years (either 20 mSv a year for five
years or 50 mSv for two years, which is in itself
a strange interpretation of the recommendations of
the International Commission on Radiological
Protection's guideline stipulating a maximum of 20
mSv a year. The letter that the ministry sent the
next day to the chiefs of labor bureaus to inform
them of the decision justifies it on the grounds
of the state of emergency, ignoring the safety of
the workers. [2]
This could be a measure
to avoid or limit the number of workers who would
apply for compensation. Stated differently, it has
the effect of legalizing illness and deaths from
nuclear radiation, or at least the state's
responsibility for them. Usually, in case of
leukemia, a one year exposure to 5 mSV is
sufficient to obtain occupational hazards
compensation. The list of potential applicants
could be very long in light of the number of
workers already on the job, or who are likely to
be recruited to dismantle the reactors. The
project proposed by Toshiba to close down and
safeguard the reactors would take at least 10
years. [3]
In short, the state's concern
appears to be less the health of employees and
more the cost of caring for nuclear victims. The
same logic prevailed when, on April 23, the
government urged children back to the schools of
Fukushima prefecture, stating that the risk of 20
mSv or more per year was acceptable, despite the
high vulnerability of children. Can the state be
prioritizing the limitation of the burden of
compensation for TEPCO and protection of the
nuclear industry at large over the health of
workers and children? [4]
Why
subcontracting? As early as the mid-1970s,
the use of subcontracting labor in the nuclear
industry was well established in Japan. In France,
this trend would develop after 1988, reaching a
rate of 80% by 1992. According to NISA's data, in
2009, Japan's nuclear industry recruited more than
80,000 contract workers against 10,000 regular
employees. The initial goal was not necessarily to
hide the collective dose, but to limit labor
costs. But the fact is that whether in France or
Japan, the nuclear industry nurtures a heavy
culture of secrecy concerning the number of
irradiated workers.
As far as we can know,
based on the figures published by the Ministry of
Health and Labor, before Fukushima's catastrophe,
only nine former workers received compensation for
an occupational cancer linked to their
intervention in nuclear plants. [5] This number is
probably very far from the reality of the victims,
given the number of workers exposed and the
numerous opacities of that system beginning with
the fact that TEPCO and other electric power
companies have always refused to disclose the list
of their subcontractors.
The objective
of epidemiological surveys An
epidemiological survey published in March, just
before the catastrophe, was based on a huge cohort
of 212,000 persons recorded between 1990 and 1999,
out of the total of 277,000 who had worked in
nuclear plants. The survey found a significant
mortality ratio for only one type of leukemia and
judged that other forms of cancer among this
population could not be attributed to their
exposure to radiation at nuclear plants.
One problem is that the survey only
calculates mortality ratios, ignoring people who
might have cancer but are still alive at the time
of the survey. Such obvious methodological bias is
frequent in this sort of surveys. In France and
other countries, another bias is the tendency to
ignore contract workers, though they receive the
highest cumulative radioactive doses. Therefore,
it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the
very goal of these epidemiological surveys is to
minimize the risks of nuclear radiation and
encourage the nuclear industry's business as
usual.
The same logic has prevailed at the
WHO and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
in their evaluation of Chernobyl's legacy.
Compared to a mere 4,000 in the "definitive"
United Nations report published in 2005, [6] the
report published in November 2009 by the New York
Academy of Sciences (based on more than 5,000
articles translated from Belorussian, Ukrainian
and Russian) evaluated the total number of victims
985,000. [7] Of the 830,000 liquidators mobilized
at Chernobyl, the Academy of Sciences report
estimated that at least 112,000 had already died,
compared to some 50 in the UN report.
While the conclusions of the two reports
remain contested, even Nakajima Hiroshi, a former
WHO director, has acknowledged that the control of
WHO by IAEA on nuclear issues was problematic. [8]
Therefore we can anticipate that the survey WHO is
planning to conduct on Fukushima may provide the
same anodyne conclusions.
Notes 1. In the 1980-90s,
Fujita Yuko, then professor of physics at Keio
University, distributed leaflets warning day
laborers not to accept these dangerous jobs. See
Higuchi Kenji's documentary
in Kamagasaki. 2. Link.
3. On the decommissioning of nuclear plants,
see NHK's recent documentary. 4.
See the reaction of the chairman of the Japan
Federation of Bar Associations to this decision,
and the protest petition online.
5. For more details, see the reports of the
Citizen Nuclear Information Center's homepage, mainly
written by Watanabe Mikiko, who has provided
constant follow up and support for these workers
(use the following keywords: workers, worker
exposure, Nagao Mitsuaki, Kiyuna Tadashi, Umeda
Ryusuke, Shimahashi Nobuyuki.). 6. Link. 7.
For a presentation of this survey, see this link.
Alexey V. Yablokov (Center for Russian
Environmental Policy, Moscow, Russia), Vassily B.
Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko (Institute of
Radiation Safety, Minsk, Belarus). Consulting
Editor Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger, Chernobyl:
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the
Environment (New York: New York Academy of
Sciences, 2009). 8. See the following reports
(French only) on the protests in Switzerland about
the control of WHO by AIEA on nuclear issues: 1,
2.
Paul Jobin is director,
French Center for Research on Contemporary China,
CEFC, Taipei Office, and Associate Professor,
University of Paris Diderot.
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