China’s “mines of death” claim 105 more lives
Thu, 13 Dec 2007. Yet another gruesome accident. Yet another attempted cover-up. Yet more empty government promises. Vincent Kolo, *域名隐藏* Last Wednesday’s (5 December) gas explosion at the Xinyao coal mine, a privatised coal firm in Hongtong County, Shanxi, claimed 105 lives. That makes it the second deadliest mining disaster in China this year. In August, 181 miners drowned when heavy rains flooded two mines in Shandong province. On that occasion, the miners had staged a pithead protest saying they did not want to go underground as floodwater was already pouring into the shaft despite management claims it was under control. They were told they would all be sacked if they refused to work. When miners are incinerated, drowned or buried alive, China’s official organs – State Council, provincial governments, works’ safety bureaucrats – go into a ritual buzz of activity, promising investigations, criminal prosecutions, action! But more and more people are seeing through this charade. The cause of coal mining deaths in China – 13 every day – is hardly a mystery. It is profit. Insatiable corporate greed, record coal prices, rock bottom wages and workers terrorised with dismissal if they refuse to work in the face of obvious danger – these factors are behind every single death in the industry. Most mineworkers in China are migrants from other provinces. Often they are landless ex-farmers or workers ‘downsized’ from the state sector. They are desperate for a job in order to feed their families, even the most dangerous job in the world. Catalogue of crimes The Hongtong mine was privatised in 2004. Mines like these have made Shanxi’s coal magnates some of the wealthiest people in China. The region is known for its BMWs and other flashy cars driven by new-rich coal bosses. It is also home to the most polluted city in the world, Linfen, with Hongtong and the Xinyao “mine of death” on its outskirts. Behind last week’s disaster are a catalogue of crimes by colliery managers. According to the Beijing Youth Daily, the mine failed to install a gas detection system and explosives were stocked in a storeroom underground. On the day of the explosion, the number of miners (128) who had been sent down the shaft far exceeded the mine’s legal limit (60). Mine managers had begun illegal work on an unauthorized seam, which they camouflaged with steel plates in order to hide it from government inspectors. The mine did not even have a roster of miners employed to check the number missing after the blast. It is common in China for mines and factories not to issue written contracts to their workers and not to keep accurate payrolls for accounting reasons. After the blast, management delayed reporting the explosion to local authorities for five hours, hoping to avoid official involvement – and penalties. In this time they staged a truly disastrous ‘rescue’ attempt, sending another 37 workers down the shafts, nearly half of whom (15) were also killed. Altogether, according to local media reports at least 50 of those killed were rescue workers. These workers had received absolutely no rescue training. Like rats abandoning a sinking ship, the mine owner and other executives reportedly escaped after the accident, further hindering rescue work. Police have arrested five managers and a search is still on for the owner and another top executive. Oxygen masks never used! Survivor, Yang Tianming, told the Xinhua news agency, “Many of the people were sent down there without reason: they sacrificed their own lives for nothing”. Another miner, Mao Caoliang, explained, “We never received any rescue training. We did not know what to do or what not to do when inside the mine. No one told us what to do when faced with an emergency. We carried oxygen masks with us but did not know how to use them. Many suffocated.” The State Council, China’s government, announced that an investigation team will probe into what caused the disaster. The Hongtong mine’s license has been suspended and its bank accounts frozen. Meanwhile, at a national press conference, the national production safety watchdog promised to “strike hard” on corruption and illegal acts in the mining industry. But we’ve heard all this before. Why is it that the Beijing’s dictators only talk tough after a disaster? And why is the talk never matched by real action? Even the state-run mouthpiece, China Daily (11 December), asked, “How does such a coal mine get all the necessary licenses for production? How did it pass the three safety inspections the local government organized last month?” In fact, the last inspection took place just six days before the explosion. Li Yizhong, head of the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS), conceded that major accidents including the Hongtong blast were caused by “weak governmental supervision and soft punishment”. Asia News reported that 95 percent of officials brought to trial last year accused of complicity in mining accidents were eventually acquitted. It is not that China’s top rulers are ambivalent about coal mining deaths. The Beijing regime is terrified of the potential political fall-out. After the Shandong flooding disaster in August, relatives of dead miners rioted upon hearing what had happened and the ruthless, callous approach of the company, which in that case was a state-owned enterprise. But as in so many areas of the economy today, government measures simply don’t bite. They are met by stonewalling, manoeuvres, cover-ups and other forms of insubordination. Local governments benefit directly from this defiant activity, in the form of higher investment, bribes, contracts and higher economic performance – regardless of the social cost. Safety hotline? This explains why the measures taken by the central government to improve coal industry regulation are largely ineffectual. Even if the penalties for law breaking were more severe, it wouldn’t necessarily reverse today’s deadly trend. This is because labour costs are so low (around 1,000 yuan or $135 a month), coal prices are so high (around $65 per tonne), and China’s miners are virtual slaves without the right to strike or join a trade union. The Beijing government has brought in foreign experts to review safety conditions in the mines. On of these experts, German industrialist De Wet Mulder, who toured coalmines in Shanxi province told Xinhua (10 December), “They didn’t even have seals on the electric switch. It could cause gas blasts when you turn it on and off. I wanted to turn back and run out almost as soon as I went down the pit.” Yet this option, turning and running, is not open to China’s coal miners. Shanxi’s provincial governor Yu Youjun – who five months ago “apologised” for the country’s worst ever slavery scandal – has promised to set up hotlines for people to report illegal coal mines and rewards as high as 100,000 yuan ($13,500) for tip-offs. But the Xinyao mine in Hongtong was a legal mine. Yu’s government was responsible for checking its safety routines before issuing it with licenses and – inexplicably – failed to do so! As for the governor’s hotline – this is an admission that its own well-paid and – we can presume – even better-bribed safety officials are incapable of prohibiting safety violations or illegal mining operations. The government is instead forced to turn to the general public in the hope this will help it monitor the industry and stamp out corrupt practises. Learn from South Africa! But who better to inspect, supervise and enforce the safe running of the coal industry than the coal miners themselves? The one measure that China’s rulers are not proposing, will never propose, is the only measure that will actually make a difference – the legalisation of independent democratic trade unions for mineworkers and all other workers, and the right to elect workplace safety inspectors accountable to the union membership, with full powers to overrule management decisions in matters of health and safety. Chinese workers will get no justice from this government. It is in the service of the mine owners and capitalists. Workers should look instead to the magnificent example from South Africa – the quarter of a million miners who went on strike last week in the first ever strike over safety in the mines (see article on *域名隐藏* ). These workers originally built their trade union as an underground, illegal force. They fought the white racist dictatorship in the past to win the right to organise. Their weapon was the strike and the general strike, prepared for by democratic mass meetings in the dormitories and eating halls. This force, alongside other workers who began to flood into the new trade unions, eventually toppled the South African dictatorship and forced the capitalists to concede democratic rights. This example and the mighty struggle of South African miners today holds extremely important lessons for miners and other workers in China.
------------------
...
| 
跨国外贸论坛
【返回跨国外贸论坛首页】 收藏本论坛 热门专题 热门帖子 
.
外贸心情 -> 在这个缺乏真情的时代，一首令人揪心的诗
您是本帖的第 3157 个阅读者
发帖时间 - 2007/12/18 20:07:37