Japan Press Weekly

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2012 January 11 - 17 TOP3 [NUCLEAR CRISIS]

Gangsters send day-laborers to KEPCO NPP

Under allegations that a subcontractor of Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO) uses day-laborers sent by a gangster group at the utility’s Oi nuclear power plant, three persons were arrested on January 12.

The subcontractor reportedly gave the organized crime group part of the contract money from KEPCO which should have been paid to the day-laborers.

KEPCO’s subcontractor is the public-listed Taihei Dengyo Kaisha, Ltd., involved in power plant construction and maintenance work. The gangster organization, Kudokai, is one of the designated “antisocial” groups whose activities are strictly monitored by local police authorities. Taihei in the past was targeted in a shooting incident, which is still under investigation with suspicions of the involvement of the crime syndicate.

Many veteran workers working at nuclear power plants (NPPs) for years say, “NPPs can’t cut their ties with organized crime groups.”

Japan’s pyramidal subcontracting system is one of the fundamental factors contributing to crime groups to engage in sending labor to NPPs.

Many companies use advanced technology to construct NPPs. However, these NPP-related companies subcontract most of the work involved in regular inspections of NPP facilities, including the reactors, to contracting companies. Not only utilities, like TEPCO and KEPCO, but also NPP-related manufacturers are reluctant to directly hire their own employees for regular inspections.

Subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and sub-sub-subcontractors are registered at NPP-related firms and nuclear reactor manufacturers as firms sending inspection workers to NPPs. Apart from these subcontractors in the top 3 layers, NPP inspection and maintenance work rely on many small firms situated in the lowest layer of this subcontracting structure. They are called labor sharks and can gather day-laborers with just one phone call.

NPPs across Japan need day laborers to do the dirty and dangerous work. This offers good opportunities to gangs to make profits by exploiting the workers at the very bottom of the labor pool.

A skilled day laborer said, “We see no gangsters at NPPs on site. They get their money from just sending us to the NPPs.”

When a NPP construction is planned, underworld groups will participated in every stage of the plan from the purchase of land for construction to the disposal of nuclear waste.

There was news coverage of the fact that after the Fukushima accident, many NPP workers took shelter in gang leaders’ houses in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

Anti-social groups represent the dark side of the state and NPP-related businesses which have obscured the dangerous nature of nuclear power generation by propagating the “safety myth”.