Fukushima nightmare continues as homeless people are recruited for cleanup, scammed out of wages

Brandon Baker in Eco News: Police and media in Japan have discovered that homeless people near Fukushima have been recruited to help clean up the three-year-old nuclear devastation for minimum wages, but haven’t seen most of their money. Most have wound up in debt.

According to Reuters, recruiters like Seiji Sasa have been trolling Sendai Station another locations for homeless people to aid in the behind-schedule, taxpayer-funded radioactive cleanup throughout northern Japan. Police arrested members of Japanese crime syndicates several times this year for infiltrating Obayashi Corp.’s subcontractors and illegally sending workers to disaster sites. Those workers were often brought in for less than minimum wage, but essentially scammed out of their earnings because they were given a place to stay during the hours they weren’t attempting to clean up radioactive soil and debris.

“Many homeless people are just put into dormitories, and the fees for lodging and food are automatically docked from their wages,” Yasuhiro Aoki, a Baptist pastor and homeless advocate, said. ”Then at the end of the month, they’re left with no pay at all.”

The homeless workers reported to companies who then reported to Obayashi, known as the country’s second-largest construction firm and one of 20 large contractors involved in governmental cleanup efforts. There are at least more than 730 subcontractors working for performing work for the Ministry of Environment, an amount that has led to scarce oversight. Loose certification and disclosure rules have made it easier to obtain radiation removal contracts. Reuters found 56 subcontractors on environment ministry contracts worth $2.5 billion in the most radiated areas of Fukushima that would have been barred from traditional public works because they had not been examined by the construction ministry...

The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, shot by Digital Globe, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license