Four workers involved in the decommissioning process at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant plan to sue the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., and the general contractors who hired them for skimming off their danger allowances.
Four workers involved in the decommissioning process at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant plan to sue the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., and the general contractors who hired them for skimming off their danger allowances. According to their lawyers, the workers say that TEPCO and their employers failed to ensure that they received the hazard pay to which they are entitled. They are demanding a total of 90 million yen ($865,385) in damages. The lawsuit, expected to be filed at the Fukushima District Court on Sept. 3, would be the first such suit to be brought by workers at the plant, the lawyers said. The plaintiffs, aged 34 through 65, previously worked or are now employed on the decommissioning project, including clearing radioactive debris and decontaminating vehicles used at the plant. They were employed by general contractors to which the utility outsourced the work. Two of them still work at the nuclear complex. TEPCO’s payment to its contractors includes danger allowances for their workers at the plant. The utility doubled the allowance to 20,000 yen a day per person for work that it outsourced starting in December last year. But the four say they have never received such hazard pay since they started working at the plant, according to the lawyers. “TEPCO is responsible for ensuring that the danger allowances are actually paid to workers,” said Tsugio Hirota, who leads a team of lawyers for the plaintiffs. “We intend to reveal the payment practices in which the allowances have been skimmed off.” A TEPCO public relations official declined to be interviewed regarding the planned suit. “We cannot comment since we have yet to confirm the facts of the situation,” the official said.