90% of the world's fireworks come from China, sometimes they explode early, with deadly consequences
The Rockets’ Red Glare
The vast majority of the world’s fireworks come from China. And sometimes they explode early, with deadly consequences.
It was a muggy first day of fall, a morning with nothing in particular to distinguish it from the decade of Mondays Huang had toiled at the Nanyang Export Fireworks Factory in southern China’s Hunan province. By that afternoon, 14 women—her co-workers—lay dead or dying in the rubble of the exploded factory, and Huang would begin a year-and-a-half-long hospital stay to treat severe burns covering 70 percent of her body. Of the 47 people working in the factory that day, only three escaped with no injuries. The rest became casualties of one of China’s most dangerous and ignored industries: the manufacture of the world’s fireworks.
In recent interviews, Huang, now 29, and other former Nanyang factory workers described the workday that nearly killed them and left their lives irreparably damaged.
______
China’s fireworks factories, which produce an estimated 90 percent of the world’s fireworks, make up a perilous industry staffed mainly by rural women: Men typically work in the management offices while women, most of whom go straight to factory work out of high school, staff the lines. The industry developed in villages where men went outside of the village or often far away to work, either on farms or in factories, so women were hired to do the detail-oriented work of making the decorative explosives. They handle dangerous chemicals everyday with little prior training, and despite growing efforts by the Chinese authorities in recent years to make the industry safer, things frequently go wrong—often with lethal or life-changing consequences.
When things do go wrong, workers and their families are left with very little recourse. China’s worker-compensation law requires employers to pay into a fund reserved for injury and disability payments, but compensation is often tied up for years or not paid at all. At the same time, despite its many casualties, the industry has flown under the radar of most Chinese and international labor groups. And while the Nanyang workers were making products for foreign export, international law provides few protections. Consumer campaigns have had an impact naming and shaming companies with global brands to maintain, but fireworks brands are so unfamiliar to consumers that they provide little leverage for such campaigns. “That is why fireworks is a struggle,” says Richard Brubaker, a corporate accountability expert and founder of the Shanghai-based consulting firm Collective Responsibility. “The average U.S. consumer has no idea where they come from. There’s no brand around them they recognize.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_grind/2016/07/china_makes_most_of_the_world_s_fireworks_and_bears_most_of_the_danger.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
