Before accident, Fukushima maintenance workers paid SAME wage as McDonald's employees: $11/hr

[Poll_Blind]

McDonald’s Wage For Nuclear Job Shows Some Japan Towns May Fade:

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. Almost 28,000 people are dead or missing and 160,000 are homeless in Tohoku, where 25 percent of the population is 65 or older and job seekers outnumber jobs by two-to-one.

Once the rescue and clean-up is over, Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s government will have to decide whether to rebuild homes, roads and businesses or relocate tens of thousands of people. The challenge: structure investment plans to bring private job creation, beyond the short-term bump from public works.

“To put it very crudely, there won’t be a lot of people left in these communities,” Takayoshi Igarashi, Kan’s special adviser on addressing population decline and rural decay, said in an interview. “Old people will pass away and the young will surely leave for Tokyo. The government now faces this awful choice of whether to invest in rebuilding these areas or leaving them behind.”
--snip--

Much more in the full article at the link- so check it out! Although the nightmare is still unfolding at Fukushima, enough time has passed that deeper and more well-written stories are starting to come out about the impact this is going to have in that region of Japan, Japan itself and the world at large. Richard Read from The Oregonian has been filing reports from Japan for a little bit over a week now, and he's doing a great job digging more deeply into the situation. I highly recommend you check his link out- he even does a follow-up interview with Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai, who's plea for help and assistance on YouTube has helped to remind the world that many in Japan are in dire situations- something Mayor Sakurai claims is not being covered by the Japanese press.

So I hope you take a moment this Sunday and read a little bit of that article I posted and maybe watch a video or two from Richard Read. Very interesting stuff, IMO.

PB

[avaistheone1]

1. Japan is a very expensive place.

How did they survive on so little pay?

[Poll_Blind]

2. How did they survive? Probably the same way we do over here: Just barely.

The article describes how that entire area in Japan has been very economically depressed. Not excerpted but the middle and end of the article occasionally touch on this point. There are a lot of rural places in Japan, places which are much, much more rural than most of us (at least me, anyway) would think of when we think of Japan.

PB

[Poll_Blind]

3. Kick for the evening crowd.

:kick:

PB

[Octafish]

4. Two-Tiered System

Management does much better, especially top management.