At least 51 miners have been killed in four separate coal mine accidents over the weekend, the official Chinese media has reported The most serious accident occurred on Saturday evening when a fire swept through a privately-run mine in Hancheng, Shaanxi, killing 28 miners working underground at the time. The mine owner was subsequently detained by police.

Chinese migrant laborers toiling in the factories of two major firms won unusually hefty raises in recent weeks, as Honda sought to end strikes and Foxconn, maker of the Apple iPad, tried to stave off criticism over a spate of worker suicides. But multinationals that find themselves backed into a corner are not the only ones starting to heed the demands of increasingly emboldened employees. In some instances government officials here in China’s southern factory belt, Guangdong Province, have also made small concessions as more workers stage sit-ins and pursue legal channels for compensation.

A retired miner from Sichuan with stage-three pneumoconiosis, who has been seeking occupational illness compensation from his former employer for the past three years, has finally been awarded 136,000 yuan in a court mediated settlement Xiao Huazhong had been seeking 190,000 yuan, the amount he should be legally entitled to, but accepted the lower award because he is currently seriously ill in hospital, has already spent his entire life savings of around 80,000 yuan on medical care, and is faced with additional hospital bills of several hundred yuan a day.

Yang Renbing is still in his 30s, but already his body has suffered damage from which it will not recover. For more than a decade, he worked in a jewellery factory in southern China where he inhaled dust that has permanently damaged his lungs. Mr Yang, 34, is one of what campaigners estimate to be more than one million people to have developed an often deadly condition called pneumoconiosis as a result of his working conditions.

Han Dongfang talks to a group of migrant workers who contracted the deadly lung disease pneumoconiosis whilst working as explosives and drill operators on Shenzhen’s construction sites in the 1990s.

CLB’s latest research report The Hard Road: Seeking justice for victims of pneumoconiosis in China was highlighted in the print edition of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on 8 May 2010.

The government’s revisions to its Work-related Injury Insurance Regulations will go a long way to giving workers the insurance cover and legal protection they need, but lack the clout to force employers to comply.

On the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in Beijing, CLB Director, Han Dongfang, expresses the hope that China’s current generation of civil rights defenders can realize the dreams of the Tiananmen Square protesters, but without further bloodshed. Photo by Chamarisk.

The central government in Beijing last week sent an investigative team to Fengyang county in Anhui to examine media claims that at least 12 migrant workers from Yunnan have died from silicosis after working in the county’s stone crushing mills. Fengyang officials claimed there was as yet insufficient evidence to prove that the Yunnan workers contracted silicosis from breathing in silica dust while blasting and crushing slabs of rock in the county’s factories.

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