Fukushima 'Decontamination Troops' Often Exploited, Shunned

Source: Associated Press

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.

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Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/fukushima-clean-workers-bottom-contractor-system-37539162