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INTERNATIONAL WORKERS' MEMORIAL DAY 2006

Tatami Weaving Workers – A struggle without ending

Since the early 1980s, when it was discovered that Yinzhou District of Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province had the perfect combination of climate and fertile soil conditions to produce rushes for mat production, the town has become the main area for the farming and production of tatami, a mat widely used every household in Japan. In 2004, the Ministry of Agriculture called it “the Hometown of tatami rushes”, as by then 70 percent of China’s tatami exports were from Ningbo, while 85 percent of the tatami and other rush products sold in Japan were produced in Ningbo [NOTE1]. In the recent years, China has started to explore the European and American market for its tatami products.

Despite its promising and ever-expanding export figures, workers from the tatami industry face serious occupational health issues. In 1999 the Chinese media first exposed the issue but by 2005, in one district alone (Zhong County in Sichuan Province, which in the last twenty years has supplied some 30,000 migrant workers to work in the tatami industry in Ningbo) it was revealed that around 200 to 300 workers had contracted silicosis, a form of pneumoconiosis, an incurable and fatal disease. The true number of victims is believed to be much higher, due to the general lack of regular health examinations among the workers, the lack of awareness of this occupational hazard that keeps many workers in the industry, the long induction period of this illness and the common misdiagnosis of silicosis in China.

Many local people ask how these semi agricultural workers contract silicosis as it is generally seen as the disease of workers in the metallurgical or stone processing field. In order to produce tatami mats the raw material undergoes several stages of processing. After harvesting the raw rushes are smeared with mud, to keep their golden-green colour and they are then dried by hot air before further processing. The mud used is a combination of quartz, kaolin, pyrophyllite and mica -  25 percent of the mud is respirable dust. [NOTE 2] According to an official from the Bureau of Agriculture in Ningbo, the mud is imported from Japan, and “it costs 3,000 Yuan per ton, even more expensive than rice”. [NOTE 3] When the rush is dried, the workers then select, refine and weave the rushes according to their different lengths. Such a process ensures that workers have long term and intense exposure to this dust, which causes silicosis. According to a group of independent researchers, in a study of a typical tatami workplace, the geometric mean (GM) of total dust concentration was 20mg/m3, and that of respirable dust was 8.22 mg/m3. [NOTE 4] The current Chinese maximum allowable concentration is 2 mg/m3 for total dust and 1 mg/m3 for respirable dust. They found that many workers develop symptoms of silicosis after a few years of working in this setting, due to long working hours and lack of work safety protection. The heavy dust at most workplaces is so serious that a woman worker reached stage III, the final stage of the disease, only two years after joining the industry.

In the past, silicosis was best known as “black-lung disease”, which primarily afflicted coal miners. Starting from late 1990s however,  workers from other industries, such as construction, tunnel building, jewellery processing and tatami weaving have been added to the growing number of victims. According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, there have been more than 580,000 cases of pneumoconiosis in China since the 1950s and some 140,000 workers have died of the disease. Currently, there are some 440,000 patients suffering from pneumoconiosis and according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, around 15,000 to 20,000 new cases are reported each year.  It is believed that the actual figure is ten times higher than the recorded figure as many cases go unreported. [NOTE 5].

Silicosis is a disabling and often fatal lung disease caused by breathing in dust that has very small pieces of crystalline silica in it. Being the second most common mineral on earth, crystalline silica is found in concrete, masonry, sandstone, rock, paint, and other abrasives. The cutting, breaking, crushing, drilling, grinding, or abrasive blasting of these materials may produce fine silica dust. It can also be found in soil, mortar, plaster, and shingles. The very small pieces of silica dust get in the air that one breathes and become trapped in the lungs. As the dust builds up in the lungs, the lungs are damaged and it becomes harder to breathe. [NOTE 6] Symptoms include shortness of breath, severe cough, weakness, night sweats, weight loss, and chest pains. Symptoms may not appear in the early stages of chronic silicosis. In fact, chronic silicosis may go undetected for 15 to 20 years after exposure. Because the body's ability to fight infections may be weakened by silica in the lungs, other secondary illnesses (such as tuberculosis) may result [these in fact may be the disease diagnosed and not the underlying occupational disease of silicosis]. These symptoms can become worse over time, leading to death. That is why workers describe themselves as having received a “suspended death sentence” when they contracted the disease.

The individual records of these tatami workers show that most of them are in their 20s to 40s and most have both parents to take care of and young children to provide for. Before the outbreak of this epidemic and ensuing media coverage, it was common practice that a whole family would move to Ningbo province and work together in a same factory - migrant workers tend to stick together and support each other, as their rights are often violated in the cities. This has lead to the horrifying situation now that many couples, siblings and relatives from one family have all fallen victim to  silicosis. In the annual meeting of the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Accident Victims (ANROAV) in September 2005, one victim described a family whose three sons were all killed by silicosis and left behind several children for a grandmother to support. It is predicted that in the coming years more ex-tatami workers will start to show symptoms and the situation will only get graver.

When many workers fell sick they returned home to their province or native village (such as Sichuan) but when some later found out the real cause of their sickness, they returned to Ningbo to seek compensation from their previous employers. However because they had officially ended their labour relationship or because – for many – they were only employed as “causal” labour, it has been very difficult for them to claim any compensation. Some have sued the factories and managed to get compensation of between 30,000 to 210,000 Yuan, but the majority of them are turned away empty handed and most do not pursue legal battles because they cannot afford the long procedure time and high legal expenses. Also, according to some workers, lawyers from Ningbo City have previously refused to take up their cases, as they were afraid the city government would confiscate their legal practitioner license (as has happened to lawyers representing other workers in similar cases). Zhong County Government (Sichuan) represented some victims in negotiations with Ningbo City Government in 2001 and 2002, but no agreement has yet been reached. Since then, these workers have been left to fend for themselves and in some unfortunate cases, they have returned to their old jobs, despite the increasingly negative effect on their health, as tatami processing is the only job they can do to support themselves and their families and feel if they are ill anyway there is no point changing work.

Workers also reported that some factories have installed machines to refine the selecting and refining process, but as the machines cannot perform as well as a human worker, the machines are only used when health departments come for periodic factory inspections.

It has been more than five years since the incidence of tatami silicosis was first reported, yet not much has been done for the victims. Despite the hundreds of cases, in spring 2005, China’s biggest tatami and mat-rush products market was built in Yinzhou District. [NOTE 7]  While the tatami traders and manufacturers handle their trade with more professionalism and in style, will they also settle the harm they have done in the same manner?

To obtain more information on this issue or to take action on their behalf please contact IHLO.

IHLO
April 2006

Notes