200 million workers cannot afford to wait

According to the National Health Commission, more than 200 million workers are exposed to various types of occupational diseases. Gmw.cn comments:

Considering that the total number of workers in China was 776 million in 2018, 200 million workers is almost 25 percent of the total. The situation might be much worse because in reality there are some minor diseases that are not included in the list of occupational diseases.

A key cause of the high percentage of occupational diseases is the lack of professional protection of workers. For the past four decades, China has made tremendous progress in all sectors of the economy. However, the protection of workers has failed to keep pace.

Many employers fail to protect their employees effectively and their health and safety training regimes are lax. And many companies simply do not pay much attention to employees' health and safety in order to get higher profits. Some companies even refuse to sign contracts with their workers or buy occupational diseases insurance for them, which means their employees cannot get any help when diagnosed with an occupational disease.

A proper supervision system is needed. Currently the domestic occupational disease catalogue includes 132 kinds of diseases, divided into 10 categories.
Yet that catalogue is less comprehensive than those of developed countries, and its updating is not fast enough to catch up with the growing number of occupational diseases. In recent years, with the country's economic transformation and upgrading, new materials and new technologies have been widely used, new occupations and labor methods have been continuously produced, and the hazards of occupational diseases have become more diverse and complicated.

Also the 132 kinds of listed occupational diseases often fail to cover their targeted groups. For example, pneumoconiosis is a major industrial disease harming Chinese workers, and the number of people having pneumoconiosis accounts for 90 percent of all reported occupational disease patients. It is time to target this specific disease.

In order to realize that, it is necessary to strengthen the monitoring of enterprises so that they will improve the working conditions for their workers, improve the relevant supervision system as soon as possible to ensure that all workers are included in the occupational disease inspection system, and to speed up the construction of occupational health examination institutions to ensure full coverage of occupational health examinations.