Working Conditions

Health and Safety in China: Hats, shoes, gloves and masks….

Health and safety in China is an enormous issue and covers a range of factors from poor implementation of regulations, corruption and collusion between factory owners and local safety officials as well as substandard training and monitoring. This short article looks at the issue of health and safety protection equipment and the lack of attention given to enforcing the right sort of protective gear in the workplace.

The approaching Chinese New Year in the middle of February usually sees two types of newspaper headlines; wages arrears and coalmine accidents. They are also the fundamental worries of workers all across China, especially at end of the year. To collect their hard-earned wages and return home physically unharmed, is their biggest New Year wish, for them and their families.

However, even the Chinese officials responsible for OSH say every year that the situation of workplace health and safety “remains grim”. The National Bureau of Statistics of China and the State Administration of Work Safety offer inconsistent statistics on work-related accidents and deaths but official estimates are around 127,000 industrial deaths in 2005 - not a very encouraging result after all the improvement plans the government has pledged to make. In 2006, while the numbers of large scale workplace disasters (with death tolls of 30 or above) has officially decreased [NOTE 1] , small workplace accidents are frequently seen in the newspaper.  Work injuries – especially those “minor” ones involving the loss of a limb or part of a limb is another big problem but is very often being overlooked. According to a mainland newspaper, each year in China, some 700,000 workers suffer from different levels of disability due to work injuries. [NOTE 2] .

Work injuries, in many cases, are avoidable if the appropriate safety devices are established, if well-functioning protective items are distributed to workers and the workplace is properly arranged. Some recent reports from the mainland Workers’ Daily focus on the fact that most accidents occur not because of bad luck but because of the poor quality of the so-called protective wear and devices.

Buying Safety Equipment

According to one of the experts working in an authorized institute for the examination of protective wear and devices, there are more than 1,000 authorized protective wear-manufacturers in China, but the stocks available on the market is far beyond the capacity of these 1,000 producers. In other words, many of the products are produced by unlicensed factories and may not have any protective functions. Between August and October 2006, authorities in Beijing collected protective helmets, boots and safety belts from some 70 workplaces and tested them. Less than half of the 140 items passed the test [NOTE 3] . Many fatal accidents in construction sites happen when the helmets do not have enough resistance against force or the safety belts break when workers are working from height.

By regulation, companies, when they give out tender notices for purchasing protective-wear, they have to send samples of their tenders to an authorized institute to check on the quality. However, only a small number of the big companies, such as the Petro China Daqing Oilfield Company Limited comply with this regulation, while the majority simply buy the cheapest protective products in the market rather than giving out formal tender notices, thus also avoiding the money needed for the examination.

Sub standard quality

That is why in many shoe factories, although managers would argue that they do give workers face masks when they process glues they also go on to say that “the workers don’t like to wear them” during the factory’s audit. Yet, further questions like “why do the workers refuse to wear them?” or “How often do you give them face masks?” are usually not mentioned. According to the OSH experts, there are eight different types of protective face masks for different usages, each one normally costs around 5-6 Yuan and must be discarded after 8 hours use [NOTE 4] . However, many shoe factories pay their workers at 3 to 4 Yuan per hour and investing more on protective masks to improve workers’ health is definitely not high on their priority list. Face masks given to many shoe factory workers cost not more than 1 Yuan each and in some factories, they only issue workers one mask for a week or longer. The reasons why workers don’t wear the masks are because they don’t fit, they are too old, they know they do not work and sometimes because the workers themselves are required to contribute to the cost of wearing masks.

The situation is the same with the building industry - a good protective helmet costs about 18 Yuan but the majority of developers and subcontractors would not buy helmets for any more than 5 Yuan each. According to a shopkeeper at a protective-wear shop, “the bosses only pay for those orange helmets which cost 2 Yuan each. They are made from recycled plastic, you know, those broken plastic plates and buckets; we cut them small and re-use them for making helmets.” One construction company manager interviewed said that his company allocated 8 Yuan for its fixed-term workers for helmets, but for temporary workers, only 2.5 Yuan [NOTE 5] .

As many workers have no choice but to accept poor-quality wear, they tend to lose confidence in them, and see them simply as an extra jacket or a hat which helps shield them against sunlight. To employers and even workers, these protective wear have become useless tools for passing audits or a check up (in itself very rare) from the labour or health department.

Lack of Examination

Another problem is that there are too few experts in this field. Currently in China, there are only 15 authorized institutes which check protective wear and devices for workers, which is an inadequate number when compared with the large number of workers. They normally do not go out to factories or construction sites to check on the devices and wears and instead they wait for those companies complying with regulations to send in their items or examine the goods of a limited number of suppliers – usually genuine ones. Many o China’s 30 odd provinces don’t have this type of institute to examine the protective wear the workers are using and some regional Work-Safety Bureau claim that they are under funded [NOTE 6] .

Many employers are reluctant to improve the working environment because they can easily avoid or pass the various government check-ups.  Many site-inspectors are satisfied as long as they see workers wear face masks or safety belts, but they have not the ability to distinguish what are the correct ways to wear them and if the items themselves are sub standard or genuine.

IHLO

January 2007