Workers pay deadly cost of jewelry trade
Behind her gentle smile and caring gaze, Tang Manzhen worries about her dying husband, whose lungs are contaminated by dust he breathed during his years as a factory gem cutter.
Chester Yung
Hong Kong Standard
16 December 2005
Behind her gentle smile and caring gaze, Tang Manzhen worries about her dying husband, whose lungs are contaminated by dust he breathed during his years as a factory gem cutter. "My husband is dying, but still I don't want to give up," she says. "All I wish now is that the factory pay for his medical expenses and give us some compensation so that he can live longer and my children can return to school."
Tang's story is a common one for workers at jewelry factories in Guangdong - including many Hong Kong-owned - that are ignoring safety, and it underscores the deadly cost of the glamorous jewelry trade, according to a report released Thursday by the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based workers' rights group.
Entitled "Deadly Dust," the 47-page study calls attention to what it describes as hundreds of thousands of mainland jewelry workers contacting silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused by the damaging crystalline silica dust kicked up by gem cutting.
Speaking at an nongovernment organization seminar Thursday, Staphany Wong, a CLB researcher, equated "getting the disease ... to having a suspended death sentence."
Describing seven case studies, the report highlights the severe damage frequently inflicted on workers' health by the trajectory of China's economic development, especially in the south.
According to an industry publication, more than 2,000 factories in Guangdong province produce jewelry for export, accounting for more than 50 percent of the total gold, silver and gemstone jewelry produced in China.
According to Guangdong Customs Services, during the first six months of this year, the province's jewelry manufacturers exported US$1.32 billion (HK$10.23 billion) worth of goods. This was 22.9 percent more than during the same period the previous year, and the most in China.
But for workers like Tang, this just means a greater health hazard.
Tang's husband, Deng Wenping, 34, began cutting gems at a Huizhou, Guangdong, factory in 1998, earning 1,000 yuan (HK$960) a month. She joined him there shortly after, gem drilling on a piece-rate basis, taking home about 900 yuan a month.
She worked from 7.30am to 9.30pm "or even later," she says, with one day off a month. This was good money for farmers from Sichuan.
"Our wages meant we could send our daughter to school and have a house built in our hometown, where we hoped to return one day. But in late 2000, everything went wrong," Tang says.
Medical tests by the factory revealed that her husband had tuberculosis.
"We were suspicious because tuberculosis is infectious and if he had it, why hadn't I caught it?" she says.
So he went for a second opinion and was diagnosed with a severe case of silicosis, which mainland workers call "dust lung." After learning he had the disease in January 2001, the factory fired both of them, Tang alleges.
At present there is no effective cure for silicosis. The illness is mainly caused by the inhalation of respirable silica dust containing tiny particles of crystalline silica or other types of quartz. Long and narrow, they lodge in the lungs and cannot be expelled. It generally takes about eight years for symptoms to appear.
A two-year medical survey completed last year examining the working environments at 800 sites within 152 jewelry-processing factories in Guangdong found that the dust at 56 percent of the sites exceeded the maximum legal limit. In some cases, by as much as eight-fold.
Tang's husband's condition is now at the last stage, she says. "He now needs oxygen therapy once every two days to combat his breathing difficulties. We cannot afford to go to better hospitals, so we go to small clinics. But still, it costs 140 yuan each time."