Contract Workers in Japan’s Nuclear Utility Industry: Can We Maintain Safety and Health Standards at Nuclear Power Plants?

Abstract

Many small contracting firms are used to maintain nuclear power plants in Japan. The accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant raised the serious question as to whether safety standards can be upheld with this system. A review of regulations governing Japan's nuclear utility industry derived two imperfect information models that implied opposing incentives for utility companies to use contract workers rather than hire employees. We then analyzed the dataset of nuclear plant worker's exposure to radiation in the power generation industry. The results suggest that using contract workers enables the utility companies to implement lower standards than those imposed by regulations and to reduce costs by circumventing responsibilities legally imposed on employers. caused one of world's worst nuclear accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). It had been believed that Japan's nuclear utility industry could safely withstand such natural disasters. After the accident, the question of whether nuclear plants were prepared for future disasters became a critical and controversial issue. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between occupational risks and types of employment at Japan's nuclear power plants. The practice of replacing permanent employees with temporary workers has been spreading throughout all major industries in developed countries. Thus, employees of contracting firms who are doing their jobs on sites specified by the host plant (hereafter, contract workers) are becoming more important. These workers are similar to temporary agency workers, but with the important difference that contract workers include many permanent employees. With the demand for contract workers increasing, differences in the working conditions of these workers and the host company's employees have become important subjects of study, because these differences might compromise the safety conditions on industrial sites. In the United States, safety and health education and training (hereafter, safety training) of contract workers attracted attention following the 1989 Phillips Petroleum