According to an official source in China, since August 2003, more than 5,000 self-employed businesses, village and town-based businesses, and other businesses in Mainland China have been closed down by the government for causing their employees to suffer from occupational health problems.
The Chinese government’s official news agency, Xinhua, and various other government agencies, including the Health, Labor, Agricultural and Social Security departments were concerned with the problem of migrant workers suffering from serious occupational health problems and implemented a special inspection campaign aimed at village and township-based businesses as well as self-employed businesses. The campaign spanned the entire country and lasted from August 2003 to March 2004. The campaign’s results showed that 57.5 percent of the total inspected businesses didn’t reach satisfactory standards. Since August 2003, a total of 5,029 businesses have been closed down and 2,873 businesses have had their operations temporarily suspended.
Mr. Li Qiang, the director of China Labor Watch, a New York-based organization, said, “This campaign should have some effect. Yet, I suggest that [the Chinese government] institutionalize this effort. Namely, they should make it a part of the law.”
According to the report, during the campaign, the Chinese government found that more than 1,100 businesses illegally employed child labor, more than 55,000 businesses didn’t buy workplace injury insurance for their employees, and more than 57,000 businesses didn’t sign labor contracts with their migrant laborers.
According to the Jiangxi Daily, a migrant laborer who was employed as a furnace man for a private steel smelting factory near the Railway Station at Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province suffered from moderate lead poisoning only two months after starting to work there. The furnace man also revealed that all the workers in that factory were working continuous 12-hour shifts in completely closed off workshops everyday without any breaks, except when they went out for lunch in turns. In the workshops, there was a great deal of dust and dense smoke that irritated people’s noses. The workers had no labor insurance when they worked.
The editor of Open Magazine in Hong Kong, Tsai Yongmei said, “There is no inspection on middle size and small businesses and there is no labor union. Those local despots, such as mayors, city committee secretaries and county committee secretaries, are like buddies with the business owners...Personally, I believe that it’s a systematic problem in China. If in China there is a very good labor union that can protect workers, that is, if it’s permitted to organize a labor union and through this workers can have their rights [protected], then this situation could be improved greatly.”
According to official Chinese statistics, there are approximately 480 million rural laborers in China. By the end of 2003, 135 million rural laborers migrated from agricultural production to businesses in villages and towns.
