Safety and Health Education and Training of Contract Workers in Nuclear Power Plants

Abstract

Nuclear power plants have used many contract workers. Their safety and health conditions are very important in Japan. Several amendments, which deregulate temporary personnel service and employment agency markets, have been done in recent years. The number of contract and temporary help agency workers have been rapidly increasing especially since the 1990s. As a result, ensuring the level of safety and health education and training of workers becomes a serious problem. This paper examines the possibility that the level of safety training of the contract workers is less than that of the direct-hire employees in nuclear power plants. We show that (1) the use of contract workers could be less efficient for ensuring the level of safety training, and (2) nuclear power plants still use contract workers in some situations in spite of the loss of efficiency. We also study legislations and past cases relating to nuclear power generation. We find that there are some structural problems that might make the contract workers less trained.