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CIBJO Calls for Workers Silicosis Investigation
(December 20, 2005 IDEX Online Staff Reporter)
CIBJO is calling on companies operating gemstone and jewelry manufacturing operations in China, particularly in the Guangdong region, to investigate the silicosis epidemic that has stricken workers in gemstone and jewelry factories and to ensure that they receive proper medical treatment.
The appeal by the World Jewellery Confederation follows the publication of “Deadly Dust”, a report on the silicosis epidemic among Guangdong jewelry workers and the defects of China’s occupational illnesses prevention and compensation system, CIBJO said.
The report, originally published in Chinese last August, by the China Labor Bulletin (CLB), an NGO that monitors labor conditions and defends the rights of industrial laborers in China, is now available in English. Click here for the report.
“In Hong Kong, I met with CLB representatives who presented me with an outline of the report’s content,” said CIBJO president Gaetano Cavalieri. “Judging by the evidence that these NGO representatives presented, I felt that it is imperative that our organization takes a crystal clear position in this matter.”
Cavalieri pointed out that during each of his visits this year to China, and in his talks with Chinese industry and government representatives, he brought up the issue of the need to protect, advance and improve the labor and health conditions in China’s gem and jewelry industry. “I will continue to do so, until this issue is properly addressed by the industry as well as by the authorities,” he promised.
Deadly Dust (PDF file of the complete report - click here.)
INTRODUCTION
In certain places in the world, an age-old scenario is being repeated. In the 16 th century Agricola wrote of mines in the Carpathian mountains in Europe:
“Women are found to have married seven husbands, all of whom this terrible consumption (silico-tuberculosis) has carried off to a premature death”. Only a few years ago certain villages in Northern Thailand were called “villages of widows” because of the large number of pestle-and-mortar-making workers who died early from silicosis.
— World Health Organization, May 2000 1
This report, based on several collective cases in which China Labour Bulletin has been directly involved, describes and analyzes the wide range of difficulties that workers in one industry in China, the jewellery processing industry, encounter when trying to obtain compensation for workplace contracted silicosis.2 According to the Chinese government, pneumoconiosis – of which silicosis and the “black-lung disease” that afflicts coal miners are the two most common forms – is the single most prevalent occupational illness in China today, accounting for as much as 80 percent of all such cases.3 According to the Ministry of Health, there have been more than 580,000 cases of pneumoconiosis in China since the 1950s, and some 140,000 workers are said to have died of the disease; the current number of sufferers is reportedly 440,000. As the same official source notes, however, owing to the widespread lack of health check-ups among Chinese workers, “Experts estimate that the actual number of cases is around ten times higher.”4 Moreover, “A further 10,000 or so new cases are currently emerging each year.”5 And according to the World Health Organization (WHO), even ten years ago the annual death toll from silicosis in China was over 24,000. 6 All the signs indicate that, as a side effect of the country’s rapid economic development, the scale of the occupational silicosis epidemic in China is getting worse each year.
This report describes the widespread failure of local governmental and judicial authorities in Guangdong Province to apply and enforce existing labour protection laws and regulations, specifically those providing for access to compensation for occupational illness and injury. The available evidence suggests that the denial of compensatory justice to workers who contract silicosis and related occupational illnesses is often a result of collusion between business interests, local government, hospitals and the courts, which have a shared interest in downplaying the seriousness
1 WHO, Fact Sheet No. 238: Silicosis, Geneva, May 2000.
2 The present report is an edited translation of a Chinese-language report published by China Labour Bulletin in August 2005, titled: Beican de Jingdi Yu Weidao de Jiuji (Tragic Plight – Compensation Delayed); available at: http://big5.china-labour.org.hk.
3 The Chinese word for pneumoconiosis is chenfeibing; and for silicosis, xifeibing.
4 Press Office of the Ministry of Health, “10 th International Conference on Occupational Respiratory Diseases (ICORD) Opens in Beijing Today,” 19 April 2005; available at www.moh.gov.cn/.
5 “Speech by Deputy Minister of Health, Jiang Zuojun, at the National Video and Telephone Conference on the Treatment and Prevention of Occupational Illnesses,” 16 March 2005; available at:
http://www.moh.gov.cn/public/open.aspx?n_id=9496.
6 According to the WHO, “During the period 1991 to 1995, China recorded more than 500,000 cases of silicosis, with around 6,000 new cases and more than 24,000 deaths occurring each year mostly among older workers.” (See footnote 1.).3 of the occupational health and safety situation in the province’s jewellery-processing industry.
In addition, we provide a rough guide to the long and complex maze of administrative and judicial procedures that workers who contract workplace-related illnesses such as silicosis are required to navigate in their search for decent compensation from employers. At each stage of the process, the workers concerned are likely to face deliberate stonewalling and obfuscation from their employers; rejection of their compensation claims by administrative tribunals and court bodies on the flimsiest of procedural grounds; and sometimes even inaccurate or phoney diagnosis of their condition by the medical authorities responsible for certifying occupational illnesses.
The report also notes the dismal failure of China’s sole legally permitted trade union body, the All-China Federation of Trades Unions (ACFTU), to play a constructive role either in combating the current epidemic of workplace-related silicosis among private-sector jewellery processing workers in southern China, or in supporting the efforts of workers who contract this deadly disease in seeking compensation from their employers through the official claims system.
Finally the report highlights the culpable failure of the jewellery processing companies involved in the seven cases detailed below – five of which are Hong Kong-owned – to provide even the minimum legally-required level of workplace health and safety equipment and procedures in their mainland China factories. In most cases, the local authorities have permitted them to continue flouting the country’s work safety laws and regulations with impunity.
The Silicosis Epidemic in Guangdong Province
Certain kinds of working environments produce harmful levels of silicon dioxide (SiO2) in the form of airborne crystalline silica dust, a workplace toxin that, if absorbed into the lungs over a protracted period of time, can easily lead to silicosis. A chronic and incurable lung disease, silicosis generally takes about eight years to develop before any symptoms appear. According to a mainland news report on the disease, “At present, there is no effective cure for silicosis anywhere in the world, and the illness often proves fatal. Those who contract silicosis are in effect placed under a ‘suspended death sentence’.”7
People working daily in any type of job where silica dust is produced, such as mining, tunnelling, stonework, foundry work, sand blasting, grass weaving, and the manufacture of glass, ceramics and fibreglass materials, are all at risk of developing silicosis unless appropriate occupational health and safety regimes are put in place and rigorously observed. The genesis of the illness is through the inhalation of free, respirable silica dust containing tiny particles of crystalline silica or other types of quartz, including cristobalite or tridymite, which are long and narrow in shape and therefore lodge in the lungs and cannot be expelled. These particles gradually sink into the lower half of the lungs, progressively debilitating the lungs’ capacity to perform normally.
7 Tian Yanhong, “Dust from Stone-cutting Engenders Stubborn Illness – Guangdong’s Jewellery-processing Industry under the Dark Shadow of Silicosis,” Zhongguo Jingying Bao (China Business News), 29 August 2004..4
Silicosis results in such chronic medical conditions as pulmonary tuberculosis, lung fibrosis and emphysema. The precise form and severity of the illness – acute, accelerated or chronic – depends upon the extent and duration of a worker’s exposure to airborne silica dust. In its later and more advanced stages, the condition becomes severely disabling. The mortality rate among silicosis sufferers is high, since the disease progresses long after exposure to the harmful dust has ceased. Many Chinese workers avoid seeking treatment when they begin to develop symptoms of the disease, however, because the medical costs are so high – as much as 5,000 to 10,000 yuan per month 8 – and so their conditions soon become even more intractable.
In April 2005, Huang Fei, deputy director of the Guangdong Health Department, informed a meeting of provincial health officials that a new spectrum of occupational illnesses has become steadily more prevalent among local workers over the past 10 years of the province’s rapid economic growth.
According to Huang, these diseases will soon enter an epidemiological peak period, posing a major health threat to a wide range of workers in Guangdong and creating a major drain on the province’s resources. Over the past three years, silicosis has become especially prominent because of the dust-producing nature of many of the province’s manufacturing processes.
9 The sharp increase in the number of silicosis cases in Guangdong is said to be directly linked to the rapid growth of the local jewellery-processing industry. Indeed, according to another official source, as many as one third of the province’s silicosis cases originate from within this one industry.
10 A two-year medical survey completed in 2004 examined the working environment at 800 different test sites within 152 jewellery-processing factories in the Shenzhen, Huizhou, Shanwei and Dongguan areas. According to the survey’s findings, the dust levels at 56 percent of these test sites exceeded the maximum legal limit, in some cases by as much as eight times. Of the 4,591 workers who took part in the survey, 137 were found to have developed silicosis. Moreover, the survey investigators were 8 Ibid. Prior to China’s recent revaluation of the RMB Yuan, US$ 1 equalled approximately 8.3 yuan. The current exchange rate is around 8.09.
9 “Eleven New Kinds of Occupational Illness Discovered in Guangdong Over the Past Ten Years – Pneumoconiosis Especially Widespread,” Yangcheng Wanbao (Yangcheng Evening News), 12 April 2005. Huang Fei added that the cumulative total of silicosis-afflicted workers in the province was 15,000, of whom more than 5,000 had already died. However, he gave no indication of what period these figures referred to, or of what categories of patients they included. For example, the figures probably do not include workers whose “household residence” (hukou) was based outside of Guangdong Province – i.e. the great majority of the province’s silicosis victims.
10 Tian Yanhong, op cit.
Yu Chaojun [from Eryou Jewellery] told us, “There were three windows in our workshop, but only one of them could be opened. The other two had been welded shut with iron strips along the outside. There was zero ventilation inside the workshop and the temperature was at least 40 degrees Centigrade. Dust and powder used to fly around everywhere, creating a dense fog. Although there were six electric fans hanging from the workshop roof, they were all clogged up with several centimetres of dust.
When you were grinding the gemstones, the water and the dust got separated, with the water draining away and the dust flying upwards; but the dust used to form a thick, damp fog all around you. Gemstone dust is even finer than flour – a mixture of ground glass and assorted powder. It was only after I fell ill with silicosis that I learned that the dust consists of extremely hard silicon dioxide.
– “Gems Plant ‘Creates’ 36 Silicosis Victims,” Guangzhou Daily, 24 August 2005.later informed by workers that the real situation was probably much worse than these numbers suggested:
factory managers had cleaned up the production facilities prior to the survey, and most of those selected for medical examination had been healthy, recently-hired workers. In a sign of how severe the dust levels at many Guangdong jewellery-processing factories have become, the survey also found that although the normal incubation period for silicosis is around eight years, many of the sick workers identified had contracted the illness after only one or two years of working in the industry.11 The wider scale of the silicosis epidemic in China can be gauged from the case of Zhong County in Sichuan, which supplies large numbers of rural migrant workers to work in the tatami weaving industry in Ningbo, Zhejiang. According to a local NGO that assists occupational injury and illness victims, there are currently an estimated two to three thousand silicosis sufferers in this one county alone.
WHO AND ILO DATA ON SILICOSIS WORLDWIDE
• During the period 1991 to 1995, China recorded more than 500,000 cases of silicosis, with around 6,000 new cases and more than 24 000 deaths occurring each year mostly among older workers…
• In India, a prevalence of 55 percent was found in one group of workers, many of them very young, engaged in the quarrying of shale sedimentary rock and subsequent work in small, poorly ventilated sheds. Studies on silicotic pencil workers in Central India demonstrated high mortality rates; the mean age at death was 35 years and the mean duration of the exposure was 12 years.
• In Brazil, in the state of Minas Gerais alone more than 4,500 workers have been diagnosed with silicosis. In drought-affected regions in the north-east of the country the hand-digging of wells through layers of rock with very high quartz content (97 percent), an activity that generates great quantities of dust in confined spaces, resulted in a prevalence of 26 percent of silicosis, with many cases of accelerated forms. The state of Rio de Janeiro banned sandblasting after a quarter of shipyard workers were found to have silicosis.
• In the USA, it is estimated that more than one million workers are occupationally exposed to free crystalline silica dusts (more than 100,000 of these workers are sandblasters), of whom some 59,000 will eventually develop silicosis. It is reported that each year in the USA about 300 people die from it, but the true number is not known.
Diagnosis and health surveillance are essential components of any programme aiming at eliminating silicosis… However, surveillance should be considered as a complement to control strategies and never as a replacement for primary prevention.
The ILO/WHO International Programme on the Global Elimination of Silicosis, launched in 1995, aims at the global reduction and eventual elimination of silicosis. It includes:
• the formulation of national, regional and global action plans;
• mobilization of resources for the application of primary and secondary prevention;
• epidemiological surveillance;
• monitoring and evaluation of results; and
• the strengthening of the required national capabilities and the establishment of national programmes.
(WHO, Fact Sheet No. 238: Silicosis, Geneva, May 2000.)
CIBJO urges manufacturers to recognize and compensate workers stricken with silicosis
JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone -- 12/20/2005 - CIBJO, the World Jewellery Confederation, has called on foreign and Hong Kong based companies who operate gemstone cutting and jewelry manufacturing operations in China, particularly in the Guangdong region, not only to investigate the silicosis epidemic that has stricken workers in gemstone and jewelry factories there, but also to ensure that they receive proper medical treatment, as well as reasonable compensation from their employers.
This appeal by CIBJO president Gaetano Cavalieri follows the publication of "Deadly Dust," a report on the silicosis epidemic among Guangdong jewelry workers and the defects of China's occupational illnesses prevention and compensation system. The report was originally published in Chinese last August, and now in English translation by the China Labour Bulletin, an NGO that monitors labor conditions and for all practical purposes defends the rights of industrial laborers in China.
Cavalieri published his statement only days after his return from Hong Kong, where he attended the meetings of the World Trade Organization.
"In Hong Kong, I met with CLB representatives who presented me with an outline of the report's content. Judging by the evidence that these NGO representatives presented, I felt that it is imperative that our organization takes a crystal clear position in this matter," Cavalieri said in a statement. The CIBJO president met the CBL representatives in a joint meeting with Cecilia Brighi, a high-ranking official of the Union Cisl, the Italian Labor Union.
"As the virtual United Nations of the international jewelry industry and trade, CIBJO is unequivocally committed to assuring that the production of jewelry would not involve forced or slave labor or child labor; that the production of jewelry will not cause any safety or health hazards to the workers, nor to any other people who are involved in the jewelry production process, and that the process of producing the jewelry or any parts and/or components thereof will not be harmful and will have no long term effects on the workers and/or the environment."
Cavalieri said that during each of his visits this year to China and in his talks with Chinese industry and government representatives, he brought up the issue of the need to protect, advance and improve the labor and health conditions in China's gem and jewelry industry. "I will continue to do so, until this issue is properly addressed by the industry as well as by the authorities," he said.
"Addressing issues of this nature lies at the core of CIBJO's purpose, and once again demonstrates our organization's commitment to involve itself in each and every issue that affects consumer confidence in jewelry products," he said.
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