An Osaka man was made to work at the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture for about two weeks, when he had been expecting to work in neighboring Miyagi Prefecture, said a job placement center in Osaka on Monday.
The worker in his 60s received daily wages of about 24,000 yen, double the sum he was initially promised, but complained that the pay undervalued the work he did at the Fukushima plant, the Nishinari labor welfare center said after interviewing the man and the company that hired him.
‘‘I was finally issued with a radiation dosimeter on my fourth day of work there,’’ he was quoted as saying.
On March 17, the man accepted the offer of a job—details of which had been posted at the agency—in the Miyagi Prefecture town of Onagawa. Instead, he was immediately sent to the Fukushima Daiichi plant to work for six hours a day clad in protective gear, handling water to cool the Nos. 5 and 6 reactors there, the center said.
The president of the subcontractor firm in Gifu Prefecture, which hired the man, told Kyodo News that its client, a construction company, requested workers who can drive 10-ton water trucks in Onagawa and the Gifu company recruited workers in Osaka. The Gifu company told the man to go directly to the firm for the work, it added.
The job center is located in Osaka’s Airin district, which is known as Japan’s largest gathering place for day laborers.
Earlier, a support group for the man spoke out against his treatment by the employer, saying, ‘‘It’s an unpardonable act to send a day laborer in a socially weak position to a dangerous place.’‘
The labor ministry’s Osaka district bureau has also started investigating the case, according to the center.
Unlike the badly damaged Nos. 1 through 4 reactors at the Fukushima plant, Nos. 5 and 6 reactors, which were undergoing regular checkups at the time of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, are in a stable condition called ‘‘cold shutdown.’’
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