The showplace of China’s economic reforms has turned into a killing field for its workers.
In early June, a new dormitory at a toy factory employing 1,000 workers collapsed, killing 11 and injuring 60. Xie Cheng Plastics, owned by Hong Kong businessman Huang Chen Gun, exports toys to the U.S.
Huang started construction of the dormitory without plans or a survey of the site. He moved 160 workers into the structure before it was finished. Despite these flagrant violations of local laws, he wasn’t charged after the dorm collapsed, nor has he compensated the families of the dead workers.
In mid-June, the 1,600-employee Zeng Shao Shoe factory burned to the ground when maintenance workers accidentally ignited flammable vapors. Only 88 workers were in the plant at the time, but 10 died and 33 suffered injuries.
A week later, a warehouse at the Yue Xin textile factory, which exports clothes to the U.S., burned in nearby Zhuhai. The next day, managers ordered workers into the damaged building to rescue bails of cloth and machinery. The gutted building collapsed, killing 93 and injuring 160.
China’s top leaders, embarrassed by the escalating death toll, rushed to the scene to visit the injured survivors. President Jiang Zemin and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen issued a stern rebuke to foreign investors, whom they blamed for neglecting safety in their Chinese operations.
But last summer’s well-publicized visits only served to underscore the brutal reality in China’s booming industrial belt. The burgeoning private sector-both foreign and native Chinese-is writing an appalling record on industrial safety and health.
The rest of fast-growing Southeast Asia isn’t much better. Countries such as Thailand and Indonesia claim to be competing for new investment with their large pools of low-wage workers.
But as an added incentive, they have given companies, both local and foreign-based, a green light to blatantly violate the most basic standards of industrial health and safety.
In Thailand, a factory fire in March 1993 killed 188 workers, one of the worst industrial accidents in history. The Hong Kong-based Kader Toy Co., which makes Cabbage Patch, Bart Simpson and Garfield dolls, had locked all the exits to a women’s dormitory, which was located above the factory. The workers suffocated trying to claw their way out.
Basic workplace standards, the product of generations of industrial experience, are readily available from world bodies such as the International Labor Organization or the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Yet new factories are being set up across Asia without regard to that experience.
In China, many factories are creating working conditions that haven’t been seen since the dawn of industrial capitalism in the early 19th Century. Lured by the presence of an estimated 60 million to 100 million low-paid and ill-educated workers only recently arrived from the countryside, factory operators feel free to do things that would land them in jail in the advanced industrial world.
The worst violators appear to come from Hong Kong and Taiwan. These overseas Chinese owners share linguistic and cultural ties with the mainland, so they’ve been able to forge alliances with corrupt local officials who conveniently overlook violations of laws and regulations.
The backward conditions only begin with long hours and compulsory overtime. Dormitories built for migrant laborers often are put on top of warehouses and shop floors.
Many of the workers are underage, without training in how to live safely in crowded conditions. To prevent pilfering, workers are locked inside at night behind iron bars and wire mesh.
All this is against the law in China, a country nominally run on behalf of the workers.
Guangdong province recently passed a far-reaching industrial code that limits the work week, prohibits forced overtime and child labor and requires firms to maintain safe and healthy workplaces. The national government also recently required that workers in all foreign-owned enterprises form unions, which theoretically should help workers improve safety conditions.
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But most workers have nowhere to turn to enforce the law. The official ideology says they are represented by the Communist Party, which controls the country’s one legal union-the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. But less than 25 percent of the 177,000 foreign-affiliated joint ventures in China are unionized.
Even if there were unions, it wouldn’t do much good. Corruption among low-level officials responsible for enforcing the laws is rampant.
Payoffs “happen all the time,” said a senior Guangdong province official. “It is not the official who collects. He sends his son or his cousin. Sometimes, he simply wants the factory manager to give a relative a good job.”
The failure to enforce basic industrial safety and health procedures is taking a terrible toll. China had 206 factory fires last year that resulted in more than 10 deaths each.
Nearly half of them were in the Shenzhen special economic zone, the centerpiece of China’s economic reform, across the border from Hong Kong. Thousands of factories fled Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s to set up shop there.
There were 65,000 fatal industrial accidents in China between 1988 and 1992, according to official statistics.
The number skyrocketed to 13,385 in 1993 from 7,633 in 1991. This year is shaping up as the worst ever, with 19,000 deaths officially recorded by the end of August. Labor activists say the true number is much higher.
“Industrial development in China is shortsighted,” admitted Li Ho, the former city party secretary in Shenzhen. “Regulations are inadequate, and many factories are left to do as they please.”
The compensation system for injured workers provides little incentive for factory owners to set up safe workplaces, according to Cen Ze Bo, director of the Ghangzhou College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a member of the Guangdong Labor Arbitration Commission.
“If a worker is crippled, they send him back to his village with 8,000 yuan (about $1,000). If one dies their family may get 10,000 yuan,” he said.
“Last year, there was a case where a worker lost his fingers. The hospital told the factory manager that grafting back the severed fingers would cost 30,000 yuan ($2,750). To just tend the wound would cost $250. The factory owner opted for the $250.”
The owners take advantage of the fact that most of the victims are migrant workers. “You can pay them any compensation and scare them because they have no hukou (residence permit),” said Han Dong Fang, China’s leading labor rights activist, now living in exile in Hong Kong. “They can be blackmailed and there is no union to represent them.”
The health and safety picture for workers isn’t much brighter in Thailand.
A government task force established to investigate safety conditions in the textile industry (textiles are Thailand’s leading export) called a majority of factories “death traps.” Most lacked fire alarms and fire extinguishers and many had blocked exits.
Embarrassed by its own report, the government beefed up inspections and declared March 10-the anniversary of the 1993 fire in which 188 workers perished-as National Safety Day.
The campaign has been ineffective, according to one of Thailand’s few union officials. Less than 3 percent of the work force is unionized.
“The inspection techniques are no good and they don’t have enough staff to go around,” said Surith Hathong, president of the Labor Congress of Thailand. “Even after they inspect, nothing changes. They call the day before and management has a chance to clean up. And they never talk to workers, only management.”
Government officials admit their efforts cannot keep pace with Thailand’s surging industrial economy. Economic growth has averaged 8 percent a year during the 1990s, after double-digit growth throughout the 1980s.
Yet the government formed a Labor Ministry only a year ago.
Officials at the new Labor Ministry said 200 inspectors were available to look for violations of labor laws. That’s 200 people to police an estimated quarter-million workplaces with more than 8 million workers.
The inspectors have no training in recognizing industrial hazards.
“As for now, our inspectors do not have that expertise,” admitted Pae Toon, the new labor minister. “But we are aware of the problem and are looking for experts to help.”
Somboon Sricomdokcare, a 35-year-old loom worker with 17 years in a textile mill, could have used some help years ago. She gasps for breath when climbing stairs. Her eyes filled with tears when recounting her struggle to convince her employer, the Bangkok Weaving Mills Ltd., that she had more than a cold.
“It started about nine years ago. I got frequently colds and fever. I tired easily. I felt pains in my chest. I got thinner and thinner. I went to the company doctor and he said I had a cold and gave me medicine,” she said.
She started missing work frequently-without pay. Three years ago, she paid a visit to Bangkok’s sole occupational health clinic in Bangkok, run by Dr. Orapun Methadilokkul.
“She took X-rays and told me that 60 percent of my lungs weren’t working because of exposure to cotton dust,” Sricomdokcare said. “She told me to take time off to recuperate.”
Four months later, she returned to work. She wasn’t paid for her absence, even though she had a doctor’s certificate. “They refused to accept that my disease was caused from working,” she said.
Today, she and 22 co-workers are fighting a precedent-setting court battle against the Chinese-Thai owner of the factory, who ships his cotton textiles to the U.S. and Japan. They are seeking brown-lung compensation for the workers. She estimated 400 of the 1,700 workers were affected.
“The machines we work with are over 20 years old. The factory has no windows. The air conditioner doesn’t work. People in the community 10 years ago complained about the cotton dust pouring out, so they shut down the vents,” Sricomdokcare said.
Methadilokkul, who trained in the U.S. at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has waged a lonely battle to make Thailand’s government and employers aware of unhealthy conditions. For her efforts, she has been forced out of her government job and labeled “insane” by Thai media.
Her biggest “sin” was taking on Seagate Technology Inc., the computer disk drive manufacturer based in Scotts Valley, Calif., whose plant outside Bangkok employs 16,000 workers, making it Thailand’s largest employer.
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She became involved with Seagate in 1991 when four women workers in their 20s died after complaining of headaches, fainting, muscle aches and fatigue. At the time, she headed the National Institute of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Thailand’s only industrial health clinic, with a staff of six.
She analyzed blood samples from more than 1,000 Seagate workers. She made a series of visits to the plant, where considerable soldering took place. She concluded that lead poisoning contributed to the deaths.
The government response was almost immediate. They shut the clinic. Her staff was fired and the doctor became a staff physician at a local hospital.
Despite her reduced status-the hospital gave her a windowless office without facilities on the top floor of the nine-story hospital-a steady stream of sick workers continue to beat a path to her door. She sees more than 3,000 patients a year, most with symptoms of byssinosis, or brown lung.
The government last year recognized just 116 occupational disease claims. In many of those cases, the companies tied up the claim by suing the worker for slander.