CHINESE FACTORIES - Workers at risk

[adios]

In a grim replay of the Industrial Revolution in the United States and other countries, industrial 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 experts 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.

If the government China is reporting 40,000 I'd say the number is much higher.

In Shenzhen's hospital wards, maimed factory workers nurse mangled hands and forearm stumps. They tell of factory managers who've removed machine safety guards that slowed output, and of working on decrepit, unsafe machinery. 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.

For me this qualifies as a sweat shop.

The workplace carnage is bitterly ironic in a communist country that was founded on principles of protecting downtrodden workers and peasants. Were he alive, Karl Marx would probably see an echo of the labor conditions in mid-19th century England that gave rise to his communist principles.

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 preside over a savage form of capitalism. It's one in which maimed migrant workers can readily be discarded. Independent labor unions are banned. Workers are placed in front of machines for endless stretches.

I don't know how accurate this article is.

Workers at risk

CHINESE FACTORIES


Workers at risk

SAFETY NON-EXISTENT, ACCIDENTS TAKE A TOLL

By Tim Johnson

Knight Ridder


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 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 that he'll get back 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 hand 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 semi-automatic. 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, industrial 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 experts 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 nurse mangled hands and forearm stumps. They tell of factory managers who've removed machine safety guards that slowed output, and of working on decrepit, unsafe machinery. 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 principles of protecting downtrodden workers and peasants. Were he alive, Karl Marx would probably see an echo of the labor conditions in mid-19th century England that gave rise to his communist principles.

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 preside over a savage form of capitalism. It's one in which maimed migrant workers can readily be discarded. Independent labor unions are banned. Workers are placed in front of machines for endless stretches.

Add to problem

But labor monitors say foreign companies that relentlessly demand lower prices, and U.S. consumers who gobble up low-cost goods, contribute to the problem.

Zhou Litai, a lawyer who represents hundreds of workers maimed or killed on the job, 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 watchdog group that monitors working conditions on the mainland.

Stories of dismembered workers are numbingly similar. Usually, the migrant worker is a recent arrival to one of China's coastal industrial zones. He or she takes 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 in a metalworking plant.

A month later, his foreman escorted a work crew to a different factory owned by a friend and ``asked me and two co-workers 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 went on the fritz, 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. On March 2, 2002, 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.

Finger losses

``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 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 Web site 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.

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.

[MMMMMM]

Glad to see this posted.

For quite some time now I have advocated the boycott of Chinese-made goods, having had the impression that such abuses were all too common, and that even slave prison labor (including that of political prisoners) is used to make cheap goods for export. Also inclining me to such boycott is that the Chinese government is still old guard communist and persists in various anti-US policies and actions. Simply put, they are definitely not our friends. So screw 'em. When they throw out the communists and join the free world then let's talk. Well have at it, Cyrus;-)

[andyfox]

The problems of workplace safety have nothing to do with the fact that the regime is Communist. The central government has little to do with the manufacturing being done in the newly industrialized areas. As the article says, it's a grim repeat of the industrial revolution in the west. Not that long ago, I worked for a metal manufactory located in Connecticut. The safety record of that factory, and all such factories in New England, was not enviable. Not an excuse, just an explanation: it's the fact that the world economy has come to China that is the problem, not that the leaders of the country are bastards.

There's little or no need for prison or slave labor because the labor pool is massive. Several hundred million people have migrated from the hinterlands seeking employment in the cities.

The pollution problem in South China in particular is horrific. Again, a kind of replay of what happened here in the west.

China is opening up economically. As in Taiwan, this will eventuate in an opening up politically.

[sam h]

Obviously, these are grim conditions. But you've got to be realistic. This is a country of a billion people that has grown economically at the absolutely unprecedented rate of 10% per annum for almost 20 years now. The gains from that have far outweighed the import of whatever desultory working conditions might now exist for many workers in manufacturing. Many, many people have been moved off the precipice of starvation, and generally welfare has risen tremendously though of course the gains are distributed fairly unequally as is always the case.

This is a huge data point in the argument for the overall benefits of market capitalism and trade for developing countries.

But it is also another in a long collection of data points against the twin arguments that liberal capitalism is necessarily the proper prescription for developing countries and that democracy and capitalist growth go hand-in-hand.

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
Not an excuse, just an explanation: it's the fact that the world economy has come to China that is the problem, not that the leaders of the country are bastards.

[/ QUOTE ]


How do you know it isn't both?

[MMMMMM]

"Zhenglin Hand-picked Melon Seeds, one of the many products of China’s brutal Laogai camps exported to the U.S. and around the world.

With his teeth cracked and hands bleeding, Wan Guifu struggled to split one more watermelon seed with his teeth. For him working outside in the freezing cold over 10 hours a day came with little choice—it was either work to produce Hand-picked Melon Seeds for the labor camp or be beaten until unconscious. At 57 years old Wan worked until he could no longer accomplish this brutal task, and was beaten to death by his fellow inmates at the Lanzhou No. 1 Detention Center in China.

The seeds Wan was forced to produce, Zhenglin Hand-picked Melon Seeds, are now currently exported throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Through the use of this type of slave labor Lanzhou Zhenglin Nongken Foods Ltd. has become the largest producer of roasted nuts in China with sales reaching 460 million Yuan. (US $55 million)

Free and Endless Supply of Workers

China’s booming economy continues to increase through its use of slave labor or Laogai camps. Laogai means “reform through labor.” It’s a system of prison factories and detention centers set up by former Chinese leader Mao Zedong during the 1950’s as a means to re-educate through labor and increase economic gain for the People’s Republic of China. As of 1979, there were apparently only several thousand people being forced to work in the Laogai system. Today it has become an enormous source of free labor and financial profit for the Chinese government. According to estimates from the Laogai Research Foundation, there are 6.8 million people incarcerated in China’s 1,100 labor institutions.

For those incarcerated in these facilities, the reality they face is long hours of brutal treatment with little sleep or food to sustain themselves. Reports of 20-hour work days and violent oppression force some detainees to choose suicide instead of being beaten, starved, or worked to death according to a paper by Stephen D. Marshall, “Chinese Laogai: a hidden role in ‘Developing Tibet.” Others mutilate or injure themselves in an effort to avoid the work. Inmates who fall behind or refuse to work are shocked with electric batons, beaten, sexually assaulted, or thrown into solitary confinement. Among those that make up the population in these labor camps are criminals, political prisoners, and practitioners of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, who reportedly now make up to half of those detained in the Laogai labor system.

Who Uses Slave Labor?

Forced labor has become both a form a torture and a source of great profit for China. With the enormous amount of free labor that comes from Laogai, China has lured many overseas businesses into its profit-through-slave-labor system. With ridiculously cheap wholesale labor costs many cannot resist the bait and unknowingly come to support this illegal practice.

Common everyday products ranging from artificial Christmas trees, Christmas tree lights, bracelets, tools and foodstuffs, et cetera are among some of the products manufactured and exported from these facilities. According to a 1998 House Committee on International Relations report, companies who reportedly have or had products made in China’s Laogai are Midas, Staples, Chrysler, and Nestle′. A recent report from one detainee in the Changji Labor Camp in Xinjiang states the Tianshan Wooltex Stock Corporation Ltd., a contractor to Changji Labor Camp, makes products for overseas companies such as Banana Republic, Neiman Marcus, Bon Genie, Holt Renfrew, French Connection and others. Orders from Banana Republic number between 200,000 and 280,000 pieces a year.

The products made in these facilities are produced by people who are forced to work in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. Detainees in Laogai have said that because of malnutrition, sleep deprivation and stress they often contract lice, scabies, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and other ailments. Sick detainees are still forced to work. Many are not allowed to take showers for long periods of time, allowing all manner of bodily substances to come into contact with the items they manufacture. These products are then shipped all over the world.

Stopping Laogai Products

Laws on the books that outlaw slave labor products have not been able to stop the tide of illegally and inhumanely manufactured merchandise from being shipped and traded worldwide. For example, since 1983 it has been illegal to import goods into the United States made through using slave labor. According to the Laogai Research Foundation China’s government publicly guaranteed to stop the export of slave labor products in October 1991.

In 1992, China and the United States signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in an effort to enable the US access to information it needed to control its import ban on prison labor products. According to this MOU the Chinese government had committed itself to investigating all claims of slave labor.

The agreement proved to be worth little in real results, given the profits China stood to lose from its free source of labor the Laogai system provides. Brushing aside requests from the US for answers on the issue, China provides “sanitized” camps for inspectors. Other tactics used to ensure production continues include false holding companies, changing addresses, and mixing labor camp output and non-prison businesses together.

“Thus, the commercial exploitation of slaves in China’s labor camps is effectively an open secret in the world of commerce,” says Harry Wu, founder of the Laogai Research Foundation.

This “open secret” Wu speaks of has become more and more difficult to conceal. Survivors of the Laogai system continue to publicly speak out about the forced labor and torture they have experienced. In addition, organizations such as the Laogai Research Foundation and the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong continue to investigate the Chinese government’s use of slave labor as a source for economic growth and to expose the products manufactured in Laogai.

Although China continues to currently benefit from its “prison economy,” it may ultimately be the world’s consumers who control the fate of the Laogai. As the world comes to realize the blood, sweat and tears going into the products they buy it might not be so easy to purchase them no matter how low the price."

http://english.epochtimes.com/news/4-3-24/20545.html

[superleeds]

This is simply the unregulated market economy at work.

I thought you and MMMMMM would be pleased

[adios]

Show me one post where I advocated an unregulated market economy anywhere. In reality I've brought this issue up many times this i.e. the issue of how Western type worker protections should be adompted in emerging market economies. It seems like many on the left want to see emerging markets develop and grow economically but are unwilling to commit to fully adopting Western labor protections in these countries. This seems to be a cop out in my mind. The only poster that stuck his neck out was nicky stating that we should tolerate somewhat lesser standards. I've heard campaign rhetoric from Kerry basically stating that labor practices in emerging countries are not stringent enough and that he will make it part of trade policy. I'm for developing emerging markets as well. I'm not sure how bad the problem really is. Sam provided what I thought was a good perspective. You've offered nothing but ignorance and disdain. Thanks but no thanks.

[sam h]

[ QUOTE ]
This is simply the unregulated market economy at work.

[/ QUOTE ]

The Chinese market economy is highly regulated. Just not in a way that protects workers from occupational safety hazards.

[andyfox]

Because it's happened everywhere when a country expanded economically and industrially; most of the prior experience, which saw the same sad side effects in terms of workplace unsafety, pollution, etc, took place in non-Communist countries. When the Communists developed the interior of China in the 1950s and 1960s, they were indeed very conscious of workplace safety. The new industrialization in the southeast and near Shanghai has taken place with the blessing of, but without the participation of, the central government. There's much more local control, mostly by the local officials and local businessmen.

The example of Taiwan, which is now a vibrant and messy democracy, will rub off on China as more and more Taiwanese start to live in China, managing the factories they're opening up there; as will the example of Hong Kong.

Communism is doomed.