Deadly dust of gem trade kills Chinese

The Sunday Times March 26, 2006
Michael Sheridan, Hong Kong

The epidemic of silicosis, caused by inhaling fine dust, has turned into a scandal that the jewellery industry fears may cause more damage to its reputation than the outcry over "conflict diamonds" .

The factories produce cut stones, costume and pearl jewellery, watches, clocks, carvings and ornaments in polished stone, amber, onyx, quartz and crystal — the vast majority of it for customers in America and Europe. Chinese courts have awarded compensation to some of the doomed workers but hundreds more are ailing in poverty after the companies sacked them and fought off legal claims.

The employers include suppliers to the British wholesale market such as Lucky Gems & Jewellery Factory, a Hong Kong-based company that has exhibited at the Birmingham Spring Fair.

"I am just waiting to die," said Yang Renping, a married man of 41 with two children, who worked for Lucky Gems in its Shenzhen factory for 12 hours a day with one day off a month. He constantly coughs and walks weakly like an old man. "The doctors cannot cure my disease. They can only control the condition," he said.

Yang won 200,000 yuan (£13,000) in compensation but almost all of it was spent on lawyers’ fees and medical bills.

The victims of silicosis tell of labouring in factories where the windows were sealed, a few fans substituted for air-conditioning and workers had no face masks to protect them from a fog of lethal particles.

"When we went home, our bodies were the colour of the stones we had been cutting," recalled Feng Xingzhong, 32. "We worked all day and night in an abandoned warehouse they had turned into a workshop. There were no windows. I broke up big stones weighing many kilos into pieces, then cut the smaller stones into fine carving. I never had a mask."

Feng and his wife Mao Changchun both have silicosis. He is bringing a lawsuit against Gaoyi Gems Company, which employed him for seven years. Although a local labour tribunal found in his favour, the company changed its name, relocated its factory and denied that it had ever employed him.

Feng’s case is now being heard by a court in Shenzhen but he is desperately worried about his sons, aged eight and 10, because he and his wife are deteriorating and owe 80,000 yuan (£5,300) to relatives and the bank.

Death has already overtaken the earliest victims of silicosis, which is caused by airborne particles of silicon dioxide. It takes about eight years for symptoms to appear and by then the lungs are failing. Eventually the victim can no longer breathe.

That fate came to a worker from Lucky Gems called Hu Zhigoa at the age of 46. The Sunday Times found his widow Jiang Xueying, who also has the disease, living with a colony of fellow sufferers in an abandoned factory barracks once owned by the company.

"We had no masks, nothing to protect us," she recalled. "There were just two fans with 100 people working in there. There was so much dust in the factory that it was like the early morning mist. But we didn’t know it was unhealthy."

Hu received 200,000 yuan in compensation before he died last September but it went on medical bills. His widow and her companions say they were all sacked as soon as the company found out they were ill.

Many of the sick have gone home to their villages in rural China to die. Deng Wenping was destitute when he succumbed, aged just 35, on December 17, after waging a bitter battle for compensation against Perfect Gem & Pearl Manufacturing. He alleged it had sealed workshop windows "to prevent burglaries" .