In a grim replay of the Industrial revolution in the United States and other countries, machinery will crush or sever the arms, hands, and fingers of some 40,000 Chinese workers this year, according to government-controlled news media. Some privately say the true number is higher.
A majority of the accidents occur in metalworking and electronics plants with heavy stamping equipment, shoe and handbag factories with leather-cutting equipment, toy factories and industrial plastics plants with blazing-hot machinery.
In Shenzhen's hospital wards, maimed factory workers tell of managers who've removed the machine safety guards that slowed output and of working on unsafe equipment. Workers toiling 100 hours a week grow dazed from fatigue, then lose their fingers to machines.
Local officials routinely overlook appalling safety conditions, worried that factory owners will relocate. They send mutilated migrant workers back to distant rural villages, shunting the burden of workplace injuries onto poorer inland provinces.
The workplace carnage is bitterly ironic in a communist country that was founded on the principles of protecting workers.
Chinese Communist Party leaders are so eager to maintain high economic growth, and to create jobs for tens of millions of potentially restive Chinese, that they now preside over a savage form of capitalism in which maimed workers are readily discarded. Independent labor unions are banned.
