The final segment of Gunter Wallraff's film "Nach Unten"/"Lowest of the Low" (about the treatment of Turkish and Kurdish workers in Germany in the 1970s) was about a temporary-contract-workers employment agency. Wallraff tried to find out just how amoral the firm was. Filming with a camera concealed in a sandwich box, he impersonated the personnel officer of a nuclear power plant and set the manager up with a proposed job where migrant workers were supposed to go into a deadly radioactive environment for a cleanup operation. He specified that the workers had to be men who were about to go back to Turkey, with no ties to bring them back to Germany (implicitly, so they could dvelop radiation sickness and die in obscurity in scattered Anatolian villages). Could the agency find him a couple of dozen men for the job? Lemme think... yeah, okay, you're on.

So, what TEPCO seems to be doing is not unanticipated.