Compensate Chinese Jewellery Workers Suffering from Silicosis!

Millions of migrant workers from poverty-stricken provinces in China travel to prosperous coastal cities in the hope of getting a better life for their family by finding a job in the factories. Many of them have never heard anything about occupational health and safety, and many of their employers see this issue as being of little or no importance.

As a result of this general lack of concern for workplace safety, about 100 workers from Hong Kong-invested jewellery factories in Guangdong Province have been identified by various labour rights groups as having contracted silicosis in recent years, and many of them are dying of this incurable occupational disease. The available evidence, moreover, indicates that the problem goes far beyond this particular group of workers, and that there is currently a silicosis epidemic among workers in the Guangdong jewellery processing industry. In most cases, they work in poorly ventilated workshops and are not even given face-masks to provide a minimal degree of health protection while they work.

Together with the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee (HKCIC), the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese and other labour rights groups and non-governmental organisations in Hong Kong, China Labour Bulletin has been helping some of the jewellery workers fight for compensation from their employers. In addition, HKCIC has recently launched an online campaign on this issue at: www.jewelrycampaign.net [2].

Many of the jewellery factory owners concerned deny that they are responsible for these workers contracting this severe occupational illness. Moreover, even medical officials in Guangdong appear to be colluding with company owners to deny the affected workers their right to proper compensation. Many of those already certified by occupational diseases hospitals in their hometowns as suffering from occupational silicosis have later been informed by the Guangdong Hospital for Treatment and Prevention of Occupational Diseases that they are suffering from some other, non-workplace-related illness. This withholding of the proper diagnosis leaves the affected workers unable to pursue their compensation claims – whether through labour arbitration procedures or through court lawsuits – against the factories and companies responsible.

To address this situation, China Labour Bulletin is launching a letter-writing appeal campaign to urge the relevant government departments and agencies in Guangdong to thoroughly investigate, and take firm measures to halt, the fast-growing epidemic of workplace-related silicosis among the province's jewellery processing workforce. Ketang Town in Guangdong, China's most prosperous province, reportedly produces more than 70 percent of the global output of artificial jewellery items. The campaign is also addressed to the various professional associations of jewellery manufacturers, both in China and overseas, urging them to take firm action to discipline any of their member companies and jewellery production facilities in China found to have placed their workers' health and lives at risk by ignoring national laws and regulations on occupational health and safety.

If you would like to support this campaign, please click here [http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/17906 [3]] and sign the appeal letter. It will then be sent to the relevant Chinese government bodies and the jewellery makers' associations.

20 October 2005