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New Law to Curb Occupational Diseases in China
Tens of thousands of Chinese workers are plagued by deadly illnesses like silicosis, chemical poisoning and leukemia each year due to exposure to hazards at their work places.
Now China's health authority has vowed to stop such health damage and deaths as a national law on prevention and control of occupational diseases will come into effect next year.
Laborers will be able to seek legal aid if their right to work under protection from a dangerous environment is violated by employers.
An official with the Ministry of Health (MOH) said the ministry has begun preparatory work to ensure the implementation of the law, which was passed by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, last month.
"Without preventive measures and law enforcement, we will have more patients of occupational diseases in the next decade," said Zhao Tonggang, director of the MOH's Department of Law and Supervision.
Such illnesses have become one of the leading causes of early loss of working ability in China, where 700 million people, or more than half of the country's total population, are working, Zhao said.
Rapid industrialization in the past two decades has turned China into the home to nearly eight million industrial enterprises, more than 20 million township businesses and some 60,000 firms opened by overseas businessmen.
Although a disease-control network in large and medium-sized enterprises has been operating for years, many township and foreign-funded enterprises have been found to be failing to keep employees away from occupational hazards.
Workshops at 83 percent of township enterprises were found to be harmful to health, and 60 percent of them had barely adopted preventive measures, according to an MOH survey in half of the 31 Chinese provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.
Workers in the industries of coal production, metallurgy, building materials, nonferrous metal, machinery, and chemicals run especially high risks of suffering occupational illnesses, said Zhou Anshou, director of the Research Institute of Labor Safety and Occupational Diseases, which is under the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicines.
The situation in some enterprises in under-developed and rural areas is even worse as these regions have adopted outdated technology and facilities, which could lead to health problems, that have already been removed from developed regions.
Zhou criticized some foreign companies which open plants in China using health-harming technology and facilities banned in their own countries.
"We receive thousands of poisoning cases and hundreds of victims die every year along with the increase of foreign-funded enterprises," he said. "Some poisonous materials were seldom found in China before."
The number of poisoning cases occurring in foreign-funded enterprises rose by 44 percent last year from that of 1999, he said.
Since many occupational diseases are incurable but preventable, the law has stipulated that facilities to prevent work hazards should be installed at the beginning of planning, design and construction of an enterprise.
The greatest role the law can play is to formulate employers' obligations in preventing occupational illnesses and protecting laborers' interests.
"Without the law and access to information about prevention, laborers are neither aware of potential work hazards nor able to obtain compensation after contracting certain illnesses," he said.
"Offenders could face fines of as much as 500,000 yuan and closure of their enterprises, compared with fines of only several thousand yuan previously," he said.
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