A week before becoming ground zero for the world’s biggest nuclear crisis since 1986, the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant offered $11 an hour for full-time maintenance work in an area of Japan that was lagging even before last month’s earthquake and tsunami struck.
The wage, the same as McDonald’s Corp. (MCD) pays for part-time work in Tokyo, shows the scale of the northern Tohoku region’s economic blight and indicates towns may never recover from the disaster.
The last nuclear disaster signaled the end of militaristic socialism. What is this disaster signaling? What will it mean for neoliberalism?
I expect it would be fair to assume that Mudede knows exactly nothing about Japanese politics and/or economics.
@1,
Wow. What an absolutely persuasive defense of paying folks $11/hour to work at a nuclear power plant.
It means neo-liberals have won.
Clearly these parasites were getting paid far too much and weren’t adequately maintaining the power plants. The responsibility for the earthquakes, tsunami and meltdowns rest squarely upon their faintly glowing heads.
TEPCO should instead start shipping in workers from Southeast Asia, to be returned after their rad-meters fill up. There should be plenty of motivated labor migration what with the rising tides and all.
I’m sure that for the yellow people that’s a good wage. I mean they are a tiny people and probably don’t need much in terms of food or shelter.
Isn’t capitalism just GRAND?!?!?
Charles,
Can you give us a definition of neo-liberalism? You mention it several times in your snippets. I want to know what you exactly mean by it.
@5 as soon as you define democratic socialism.
@2, I don’t think the intent was to defend the wage, but, well, they’re not talking about technicians but wastepaper-basket-emptiers. What would you have had them offer their janitors?
As a parallel, I’m sure you wish Tim Keck would pay you more than he has to in order to keep you posting diligently and not organizing his workforce – but does he?
The article Charles links to is about the disappearance of good paying industries from these areas of Japan, and how even the only one left, this nuclear one, never paid very well. Japan is heading into the second decade of its attempt to rebuild its economy after their own housing bubble burst. It has not been working well at all. They have let their industries die off in favor of new economy reliance on services and finance. Does this not echo at all to you here in Seattle?
It’s not about defending or prosecuting improper wages, it’s how the difficulty of getting employers to rural Japan who are capable of providing jobs at a level that produces a living wage.
That’s the starting wage for Boeing machinists as well. Scary.
You never fail to disappoint, Comrade Mudede! The tsunami and subsequent earthquake would never have occurred under central planning, averting disaster at fukushima! And, these people would have been paid a wage commensurate with excluding the most vulnerable labor sector (unskilled) from participation in the labor market. It’s not like here in the blessed united states, where entire rust belt communities have been dying for decades due to outdated industry, corporate greed legitimized by armies of lobbyists–industries that are no longer of use to the magical and all seeing free market. And by artificially sustaining movement along the productivity curve to compensate for population growth (creating a situation of negative GDP growth), under neomarxism, we could sustain many industrial (real) workers making products that nobody wants. Workers of the world unite against the capitalist conspiracy of nationless corporations…there is no middle ground between pure capitalism and pure socialism!
There is folly in always making the wage earner the fall guy for rising costs.
11$ an hour @ mcdonalds? almost makes being a migrant appealing
What’s more upsetting to me than the low pay is the info in the article from today’s morning news about the busting of unions for Japanese nuclear contractors. Union leaders were physically assaulted for having the gall to want things like “being allowed to tell the truth to government inspectors” and “getting paid for the full day even if you have to leave early due to radiation exposure.”
Goldy @2: Have you and Mudede been smoking weed together? The northeastern part of Japan is essentially socialist. It has been propped up for decades by massive government spending on public infrastructure projects, but no industry other than the nuclear power industry (encouraged by the government) has located there. There are some extraction industries, such as forest products and fishing, that struggle along. But for the most part, anyone with a high school diploma and a pulse leaves for the big city. This is the case in many, many countries, of all politico-economic forms. It has essentially not a single thing to do with “militaristic socialism” or “neoliberalism,” neither of which had any connection whatseover with nuclear disaster. The post is inane.
Fukushima is your kind of place,
MOX rods in your face,
Cesium up your nose,
Iodine between your toes
Neutrons running down your back
I want my Prefecture intact
Before I get a millisevert…at-tack.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1WW18QId…
Unpossible!
You would have me believe that the company running a nuclear plant would be penny wise and pound foolish?!? Paying a low wage might boost profits in the short term, but market forces are sure to punish any company that didn’t pay top dollar for the most competent people it could afford to hire. This is a nuclear plant for God’s sake!
I’ll remind you that companies who took foolish risks to save money are all in the dustbin of history. Remember Union Carbide? Or Goldman-Sachs? Or General Motors? Of course you don’t. These companies are all long gone because their dumb gambles destroyed them and their stockholders were taken to the cleaners due to their shortsighted management. These unprofitable risk-takers were replaced by more intelligent competitors who balanced short term and long term risks. Dangerous products, money-losing strategies that harm investors, risky safety strategies all sapped the profits of companies like that. Nobody wants to be unprofitable like Goldman-Sachs was. Ask your grandfather about them. Ask grandpa about how Union Carbide was sloppy and killed thousands of people, and it destroyed the company.
Or consider BP. Remember BP? They used to be flying high. They made a lot of money by cutting corners but it caught up to them and now where are they? I ask you. If BP were still around making huge profits, well, then we could question the iron logic of the market, but is it?
I assure you, Mr. Mudede, Tokyo Electric Power would never repeat these mistakes of the past. Investors use their financial power to make sure no company ever does such a thing. The laws of the market are too powerful to allow otherwise.
Anyone who says Fukushima Dai-Ichi pays $11 per hour is a liar. It’s a lie! I know it’s a lie because market forces are facts! We know market forces are facts because the USSR collapsed. QED.
Good lord, Nurse, I missed that in Morning News. How awful, but thanks for pointing it out. And if that’s what Bloomberg meant by “maintenance workers”, I hastily withdraw my ordinary interpretation of the phrase. Shit.
You get what you pay for.
By “maintenance”, do they mean janitorial? What were these employees responsibilities? How am I supposed to read that article? It nearly postulates that because such low wage earners were involved, 28,000 people lost their lives. Not cool.