Sun, Jul 28, 2019 page11

• Tokyo’s construction pace raises work safety worries

  • AFP, TOKYO
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  As next year’s Tokyo Olympics preparations enter their final stage, officials have been touting the city’s readiness, but activists and workers’ groups have said that speedy venue construction has had dangerous consequences.

  The Olympic opening ceremony is now less than a year away and more than half the new venues being built for the Games are already complete.

  “We are where we want to be,” Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike confidently told reporters earlier this month.

  However, some have argued that the city has kept on schedule at the cost of the health and safety of the thousands of workers building the sites.

  An official tally showed that there have been at least two deaths linked to Olympics construction in Tokyo.

  In 2017, a 23-year-old Olympic stadium worker killed himself after clocking nearly 200 hours of overtime the month before, with the local labor office recognizing his suicide as a case of death from overwork, a phenomenon known as karoshi.

  The following year, a man was crushed to death between a crane and scaffolding.

  Fourteen people have also been injured during construction, official records through the end of last year showed.

  However, while London had a near perfect construction safety record for the 2012 Games, Tokyo is still doing significantly better than other Olympic hosts.

  In Rio, at least 11 people were killed during construction for the Games and in Beijing authorities acknowledged at least six deaths, but media reports said that more than 10 people were killed.

  Still, workers in Tokyo have said that they are being squeezed by the twin pressures of labor shortages and a tight schedule.

  “The work is hard,” said one veteran contractor in his sixties, who works as a sub-subcontractor on a project to build the Olympic Village.

  Personnel was about 40 percent short and the pressure to stay on schedule has led to safety shortcuts, he said.

  He described days when he and his colleagues continued to work as a crane arm clutching a huge block of concrete moved overhead. They did not move, even after safety whistles were blown.

  “We were too busy,” he told reporters on condition of anonymity. “It’s like an assembly line for cars. You have to install the hoods no matter what, because those putting in the windshields are waiting next.”

  They would only move when labor office inspectors came over.

  “The breaks resulted in us being forced to hurry even more for the rest of the day, only increasing the risks,” he said.

  Labor unions have said that the problems with Olympic construction reflect issues in the industry in Japan more broadly, including the widespread use of multiple subcontractors who have little power to protest poor conditions.

  Six-day workweeks are common and the aging country’s labor shortage means workers are stretched thin.

  One in four workers in Japan’s construction industry are aged 60 or older, far outstripping the number of workers aged 30 or younger.

  Overwork is also a problem for workers in other industries, despite government efforts to address excessive hours.

  The conditions have raised concern among labor activists.

  In May, the Building and Wood Workers’ International union reported “alarming” testimony from 40 workers building the New National Stadium and Olympic village.

  The report warned of “dangerous patterns of overwork” and said that some workers had been forced to buy their own protective equipment.

  It said that workers described unsafe conditions and that half of those interviewed did not have formal contracts — a situation not illegal in Japan, but uncommon in other industrialized countries.

  It also accused employers of creating a “culture of fear,” with workers afraid of losing their jobs if they complained or reported problems.

  Olympic organizers, along with the Tokyo City Government and the Japan Sport Council, which is in charge of building the new stadium, said that they are discussing the report with the international union.

  Council vice president Jugo Imaizumi said that he thought there had been a “misunderstanding.”

  “Many people who came back here after working elsewhere say they realized conditions here are really good,” Imaizumi told reporters.

  Olympics work sites close at night to prevent overwork and employees have Sundays off, he added.

  Officials have also said that only a handful of complaints have been submitted to the city government and Olympic organizing committee.

  However, labor officials said that is merely evidence of workers’ reluctance to speak up, because although they can request anonymity, they are required to submit their name and telephone number when filing a complaint.

  “Their logic is that since there is no filing of complaints, there is no problem,” a labor union official near Tokyo told reporters. “The system is just to establish an ‘alibi’ for them.”
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