Posted on 03/14/2016 10:02:47 AM PDT by ransomnote
The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains.
They were simply labeled "decontamination troops" — unknown soldiers in Japan's massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside.
The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine.
Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation's murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations. Vulnerable to exploitation and shunned by local residents, they typically work on three-to-six-month contracts with little or no benefits, living in makeshift company barracks. And the government is not even making sure that their radiation levels are individually tested.
"They're cleaning up radiation in Fukushima, doing sometimes unsafe work, and yet they can't be proud of what they do or even considered legitimate workers," said Mitsuo Nakamura, a former day laborer who now heads a citizens' group supporting decontamination laborers. "They are exploited by the vested interests that have grown in the massive project."
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Thats scary.
I’m sure there’s equal concern for laborers who clean up a town that has been hit by a tornado or clean up areas which have been flooded... Let’s see...
Huh, for some reason, ABC’s not reporting on them.
It is an article full of little facts, lots of wild speculation mostly by people hardly qualified to even comment on the issues, with the excuse that ‘no one was allowed to talk to us.’
In other words, an agenda piece. Nuclear is bad. Contract labor is bad. Go ‘green’ and ‘be union’ are the overall messages.
The yakuza is involved in the subcontracting.
There is an amazing quietness from the global warming crowd concerning this real environmental crisis that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Sounds like they need to do like we do and allow in some “migrants”...I hear there is a surplus of unemployed men in the region of Syria these days...
It’s a meritocracy without either a welfare system or functional religious care for the poor.
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