Kyodo News reporting that sub-contracting, and even sub-sub-contracting, is rampant at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and is playing a major role in the problems there.

Kyodo News interviewed one of the workers that was sent to the hospital with Beta Burns last week. It turns out the worker is a sub-sub-contractor.  He said the reason they didn’t have protective gear is the fact that TEPCo has a lack of communication with its sub contractors.  Tokyo Electric calls its sub-contractors ”associate enterprises”.

The injured worker suggests that the most dangerous work is being forced on the sub-sub-contractors.  He claimed lack of supervision, and lack of radiation monitoring for the workers. Also, he says the problem with radiation levels is worse than what’s being reported. Many highly radioactive materials litter the nuclear plant’s compound, after the hydrogen gas explosions.  They can not be removed because of their high levels of radiation.

Kyodo News found other sub-contractor employees who are no longer working at the plant. They said their employers begged them to come back to work, even offering 80,000 yen per day. They said no way, not with the amount of radiation there.

I have worked for corporations here in the U.S. that sub-contract, and my experience is that once a company sub-contracts, anything regarding safety & training is quickly forgotten, because it becomes the responsibility of the sub-contractor.  Companies like to sub-contract, not just because it saves them money, but because it passes on legal liabilities to the sub-contractor.  My experience is that sub-contractors are even less capable when it comes to providing training, or enforcing safety.  The sub-contractors I worked for expected training to be done by senior employees, but in many cases the ‘senior’ employees had recently been hired and didn’t really understand their job.

Also, the managers of the sub-contractors would hold so called ‘safety meetings’, where they would force employees to sign papers saying they attended a safety meeting.  The problem is that nothing was discussed at the so called meeting.  The safety meetings were ‘held’ on paydays, and the managers held back the paychecks until the employees signed the safety meeting documents.  I refused to sign the document, and threatened legal action if they didn’t give me my paycheck.  That works, because it’s the law. But, to my amazement, 90% of my fellow co-workers did what the management told them to do, for fear of losing their job.  Even my example of refusing to go along with sub-contractor management wasn’t enough to ease their fear.  I quit most of my jobs with sub-contractors because of training and safety issues (work environment was getting too dangerous). I think only once was my job threatened for my demanding they follow regulations (that’s because I actually turned them into state officials), so I don’t know why so many employees are afraid of losing their job.

This is just another example of why corporations suck!

By the way I began to see a similar situation developing within the U.S. military (specifically National Guard). I did complain about regulation violations to superiors, and it did affect my continued enlistment (they wouldn’t let me re-enlist after 13 years).