China’s working people have no real labor safety protections to speak of. I searched for “labor safety” on Baidu, the search engine I use most often in China, and the following text came up. Yet there is not a single word in this passage that is not a lie completely at odds with reality.
Labor safety refers to workers’ right to be protected from personal injury and occupational diseases during their professional activities. It covers safe working conditions, accident prevention, health protection, and other areas. International labor conventions, as well as China’s Constitution and Labor Law, require employers to establish safety systems, provide compliant facilities and protective equipment, implement the “Three Simultaneities” principle for safety facilities and the main project, and protect workers’ legally guaranteed rights, including the right to know, the right to refuse to carry out work in violation of safety regulations, the right to take emergency measures to avoid danger, and the right to report and file complaints. Under the Labor Law, employers must establish labor safety and health systems, provide workers with safety and health education, offer working conditions and protective equipment that meet required standards, arrange regular medical examinations for workers engaged in jobs involving occupational hazards, and implement the “Three Simultaneities” principle. The state has established systems for statistically reporting and handling workplace deaths, injuries, and occupational diseases. People’s governments at or above the county level and employers must, in accordance with the law, compile statistics on, report, and handle relevant accidents.
This passage claims that China’s so-called Labor Law requires employers to establish labor safety and health systems, provide workers with safety and health education, offer working conditions and protective equipment that meet required standards, and arrange regular medical examinations for workers engaged in jobs involving occupational hazards. Yet not the slightest trace of these lies can be found in the real lives of workers. I myself once took a job at a large, officially registered factory in a major southern city, where I worked as a mechanical assembly worker. (Note that this was not even a small factory in a third- or fourth-tier city, much less one of the countless illegal workshops in extremely backward rural areas or county towns. It was in a first-tier city in southern China, where the capitalist economy is highly developed, and it was one of the largest factories around.) When I read this description of the Labor Law, I could not help thinking of what I had seen and experienced there.
First of all, the factory never provided workers with any kind of safety and health education. Before starting work, there was indeed an orientation session that lasted several hours, but it did not say a single word about the various chemical reagents workers would come into contact with on the job, their effects on workers’ health, or how to protect themselves. Instead, it focused on “clarifying workers’ obligations.” Workers were shown examples of various workplace accidents in advance and told that all of them were tragedies caused by the workers’ own lack of safety awareness and violations of operating procedures. Workers were even required to sign a form acknowledging that they had received the training, so that the company could later shirk responsibility if a workplace injury occurred.
Next, there is the claim that employers provide working conditions and protective equipment that meet required standards. Many companies are forced to provide workers with a limited amount of labor protection, such as protective gloves or safety shoes. This is the result of many workers’ long-standing struggles on the job. Even so, these provisions are grossly inadequate. Many positions involve health hazards such as noise and high temperatures, yet employers offer no real solutions. Gloves might be issued only once a month or even once every six months; once workers used them up, they could only buy replacements with their own money. When I started at that factory, the labor protection supplies I received consisted of one pair of safety-toe shoes, one bar of soap, one towel, one pack of sanitary pads, and one pack of nitrile gloves—nothing else. After that, I never saw any protective equipment distributed again. An adult woman uses far more sanitary pads in a month than were contained in that single pack, and every worker needs to go through many gloves each month. Seeing one pack of terrible-quality sanitary pads and one pack of gloves made the supposedly “protective” provisions seem utterly ridiculous: they were nothing more than a show. Even these cosmetic measures were the result of struggles by workers in the past. In other, more brutal and backward regions, workers cannot even obtain these basic labor protections. Before joining that factory, I had never even seen poor-quality sanitary pads provided as labor protection, which made me particularly furious.
Finally, there is the claim that workers engaged in jobs involving occupational hazards receive regular medical examinations. There were indeed medical examinations, one before starting work and another after employment began, but the examinations themselves were carried out in an extremely perfunctory manner. Even if the urine and stool samples had been placed in clean water, they probably still would have been declared to have “normal levels.” The supposed surgical and internal-medicine examinations consisted of a “miracle doctor” sitting in front of a computer, clicking the mouse around while asking whether you had ever suffered from any illnesses, and then checking off every item on the examination form. That was all it took to complete either a pre-employment examination or a comprehensive occupational-disease examination. These two aspects were the most obvious; although the other examinations went through the motions, I imagine their actual effectiveness was not much different.
These are only some of the circumstances I personally experienced in the past, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the so-called Labor Law. I would not claim that my experience represents the situation of all Chinese workers, but I suspect that the circumstances of China’s ordinary workers can only be worse and more appalling than this, never better.
