The central government in Beijing last week sent an investigative team to Fengyang county in Anhui to examine media claims [2] that at least 12 migrant workers from Yunnan have died from silicosis after working in the county’s stone crushing mills.

Fengyang officials claimed there was as yet insufficient evidence to prove that the Yunnan workers contracted silicosis from breathing in silica dust while blasting and crushing slabs of rock in the county’s factories. The officials went on to claim that all of the county’s small-scale rock crushing plants that offered minimal or no protection to their employees had now been closed down.

Fengyang county [3], in northeast Anhui, has substantial limestone and quartzite deposits, and more than 300 enterprises engaged in rock processing, producing on average five million tons of quartz sand each year. The sand is used in glass production and county officials boast that one quarter of all China’s glass is manufactured from Fengyang sand. Cement (produced partially from limestone) is the other big industry in Fengyang, with the bulk of the county’s tax revenue coming from cement producers.

County officials, who clearly have a vested interest in protecting one of their most important local industries, told the China Daily [4] newspaper that the local authorities in Yunnan had not yet provided sufficient evidence to pin the blame on Fengyang’s quartz sand factories.

“It is still early to draw the conclusion that the workers died from working in the quartz-crushing mills in Fengyang county,” the county’s publicity chief, surnamed Chen, told the newspaper.

Now that the Fengyang case has become national news in China, it will hopefully raise awareness of the silicosis epidemic that afflicts migrant workers in a whole range of industries from gem cutting [5], to coal mining [6] and rock crushing, and as a result lead to improved working conditions.

It also clearly highlights the problems migrant workers have in claiming work-related illness compensation from enterprises far from their homes. All too often they lack the documentation and financial resources to pursue a claim and have to rely on government officials in their local area to provide assistance.

Moreover, as CLB demonstrated in its research report on work-related illness and injury [7], local governments will often seek to protect major industries and corporations in their region from claims by injured workers. For example, it took Zhang Guangli [8], an employee at the powerful Angang Steel plant in Liaoning, 13 years to get the compensation he was entitled to under the law after losing four fingers in a work-related accident, simply because the local authorities were too scared of Angang to process his claim.