Washington Post

Article on Tragic Death of Worker

Confirms NLC Investigation on Toy Factories in China

On May 13, 2002 the Washington Post ran a long article on the death of Li Chunmei, a 19-year-old woman who fainted one day on the production line of the toy factory where she worked and that night died of what China’s more daring newspapers call guolaosi—"overwork death."

The article confirms the findings of the NLC’s exhaustive January 2002 "Toys of Misery" report, findings the massive U.S. companies that sell these toys—Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, Disney, Mattel, and Hasbro— continue to deny. The Washington Post documented serious systematic violations of China's labor laws, including:

• Mandatory daily shifts of 15 hours or more, from 8:00 a.m. to after midnight and sometimes past 2 a.m. or 3 a.m.
• Forced to work seven days a week for two months straight, without a day off.
• Paid 12 cents an hour, for 105 hours a week.
• Cheated out of overtime pay.
• Wages paid two months late.
• Fined three days' pay for missing a night shift due to exhaustion.
• Fined for more than five minutes in bathroom.
• Fined for failing to meet production quotas.
• Air thick with fibers, temperature above 90 degrees.
• Total suppression of right to organize.
• Company monitoring inspections always announced in advance.
• Many factories not "monitored" at all.

Lying on her bed that night, staring at the bunk above her, the slight 19-year-old complained she felt worn out, her roommates recalled. She was massaging her aching legs, and coughing, and she told them she was hungry. The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she had not eaten at all.

"I want to quit," one of her roommates, Huang Jiaqun, remembered her saying. "I want to go home."

Finally, the lights went out. Her roommates had already fallen asleep when Li started coughing up blood. They found her in the bathroom a few hours later, curled up on the floor, moaning softly in the dark, bleeding from her nose and mouth. Someone called an ambulance, but she died before it arrived.

The exact cause of Li's death remains unknown. But what happened to her last November in this industrial town in southeastern Guangdong province is described by family, friends and co-workers as an example of what China's more daring newspapers call guolaosi. The phrase means "over-work death," and usually applies to young workers who suddenly collapse and die after working exceedingly long hours, day after day.

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© 2006 by St.Clair