Sorry........here is the story.........
China sees surge in factory accidents
By Tim Johnson, Knight Ridder | April 18, 2004
SHENZHEN, China -- The Pingshan People's Hospital in the thriving industrial city of Shenzhen has a ward devoted to hand injuries. In one room, Yan Kaiguo, 23, cradles his bandaged right hand. On April 8, a machine at an electronic circuit board plant had crushed part of his index finger.
Yan feels lucky that he lost only part of his finger, down to the first knuckle. He's confident he won't lose his job, which pays about $96 a month.
''Every day, we get five or six cases like this and sometimes over a dozen," said a surgeon at another large Shenzhen hospital, who asked that neither he nor his hospital be identified for fear of reprisal from city officials. ''Most of the machines are old and semiautomatic. The workers have to put their hands into the machines."
In a grim replay of the Industrial revolution in the United States and other countries, machinery will crush or sever the arms, hands, and fingers of some 40,000 Chinese workers this year, according to government-controlled news media. Some privately say the true number is higher.
A majority of the accidents occur in metalworking and electronics plants with heavy stamping equipment, shoe and handbag factories with leather-cutting equipment, toy factories and industrial plastics plants with blazing-hot machinery.
In Shenzhen's hospital wards, maimed factory workers tell of managers who've removed the machine safety guards that slowed output and of working on unsafe equipment. Workers toiling 100 hours a week grow dazed from fatigue, then lose their fingers to machines.
Local officials routinely overlook appalling safety conditions, worried that factory owners will relocate. They send mutilated migrant workers back to distant rural villages, shunting the burden of workplace injuries onto poorer inland provinces.
The workplace carnage is bitterly ironic in a communist country that was founded on the principles of protecting workers.
Chinese Communist Party leaders are so eager to maintain high economic growth, and to create jobs for tens of millions of potentially restive Chinese, that they now preside over a savage form of capitalism in which maimed workers are readily discarded. Independent labor unions are banned.
Labor monitors say foreign companies that demand lower prices and US consumers who gobble up low-cost goods contribute to the problem.
Zhou Litai, a lawyer who represents hundreds of workers, said foreign consumers should be aware that some ''Made in China" products ''are tainted with blood from cut-off fingers or hands."
Smaller-factory owners have no leverage with global buyers and are always worried they'll be replaced by other suppliers, so they try to make money rapidly, said Chen Ka-wai, the assistant director of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, a group that monitors working conditions on the mainland.
The stories of dismembered workers are disturbingly similar. Usually, migrant workers are recent arrivals in one of China's coastal industrial zones. They take any job offered, no matter the conditions. With no safety training, the worker is assigned to an unfamiliar machine.
Wang Xuebing, a 19-year-old from Hubei Province in central China, came to Shenzhen and got a job in July at a metalworking plant. A month later, his foreman escorted a work crew to a different factory, where he and two co-workers were asked ''to operate a metal mold machine," Wang said.
The machine made casings for air conditioners, using tons of pressure to mold sheeting. Wang said the machine broke, but was rigged to work again.
''When I placed a metal sheet in the machine, it pressed down. My hand was severed. I lost consciousness," Wang recalled.
Zhu Qiang came to the Pearl River Delta region from inland Sichuan Province in early 2002. On March 2 of that year, he got a job making industrial plastic and shopping bags. Two weeks later, while working a 16-hour shift, he lost his right hand.
''We were extremely tired. We were nodding our heads, almost asleep," Zhu said. ''My hand got tangled with the plastic and got burned. I was rushed to the hospital. There was no way to save my hand."
For the loss of his right hand, 22-year-old Zhu was given about $4,800.
China's state-owned media are mentioning more frequently the staggering number of workplace injuries, especially in the region that includes Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.
''There are at least 30,000 cases of finger losses each year in the Pearl River Delta factories, and the total number of fingers being cut off by machines is over 40,000," the China Youth Daily, a state-owned national newspaper, said in a short report on March 13.
Chinese media call Yongkang in coastal Zhejiang Province the ''finger-cutting city." Yongkang's 7,000 small factories make tools, and some 1,000 workers in those factories lose fingers or hands each year, the Metropolis Express newspaper said on Feb. 18.
''The majority of them will be immediately fired by the owners," said the website run by the Communist Party's national newspaper, People's Daily. ''The compensation for each cut-off finger is 500 yuan," or about $60, roughly a month's salary.
For a young person, losing a hand spells doom. With as many as 20 million healthy people clamoring for jobs each year, factory owners never hire disabled people. Dismembered workers are condemned to destitution -- and often loneliness.
''With no money, it's hard to find a girlfriend," said Sun Hongyuan, 28, a worker who lost his right hand several years ago.
Industrial accidents also are disasters for rural parents, most of whom have only one or two children because of China's strict restrictions on births, and they rely on their children for support in old age.
Some workers would prefer to die because their parents would get a larger one-time compensation, said Luo Yun, professor of workplace safety at Beijing's University of Geology.
''There's a popular saying now: 'We can afford to die, but we can't afford to be injured,' " Luo said.