from EuroBiz Magazine

May 2008

by Bill Dodson

The Western manager in Chongqing about whom I’d written in last month’s column called me recently with tragic news. One of his Chinese operators had been killed in the machine the worker was tending. It seemed it all happened within ten minutes: the victim’s work partner had gone off to get some materials; when the partner returned the machine had snatched the operator’s shirt, and strangled the operator; twelve minutes later, they were in the hospital, doctors in attendance, but the operator could not be saved.

I related the story to a number of Western managers in China. Without fail, each of them told me their own factory stories as managers of Chinese operators. In one instance, an Englishman told me how the Chinese owner of the factory into which the Englishman had been hired had disassembled the machinery guards and warning sensors that protect the arms of machinists. Operators sometimes have to reach deep inside the machines, which should automatically stop when material is trapped inside them and needs to be pulled out. “Operators – with the blessing of the Chinese owner – would take the male sensor on one side of the machine and simply push it into the female sensor on the other side of the machine, effectively short-circuiting the safeties. I told them they can’t do that; the makers of the machine made the system that way for a reason: to protect the workers.”

Another Western manager told me how a young Chinese technician at a local factory had chosen to change out a product in testing without allowing the test cycle to finish. She had bypassed the safety mechanisms in order to save time switching out products under test. Sharp pincers that normally hold the product in place mistook her finger for the next product to be tested, and splayed the finger open. Blood, by the telling, sprayed onto her and her co-worker, who watched the whole episode without comment and acted only when it was too late.

Safety supervision in the interior of China is certainly difficult to manage for several reasons: workers are less conditioned to international standards of safety than their counterparts who have been working in Western factories and Western-managed construction sites on the East coast; most supervisory level staff and inspectors are absorbed and better paid in the ongoing projects on the East Coast; few supervisors acquainted with Western safety standards – Chinese or Western – want to relocate to China’s interior. The GM in Chongqing is calling throughout China and back to headquarters for temporary supervisors who can stay onsite to manage decoration and equipment installation: he can’t find enough support locally.

But even when there are supervisors aplenty, Chinese operators have a tendency to ignore regulations. One email to operators I had received from a friend who was manager of a China facility read, “It is not enough to wear safety goggles on your head; you must wear them over your eyes!”

Chinese have a very different sense of risk than we do in the West. Westerners who visit China and those who live here see that in everyday life Chinese roadways are fraught with high adventure (resulting in the highest absolute rates of fatality in the world), while construction sites are stitched together with bamboo rigging upon which workers blithely balance like trapeze artists. One Western manager found himself responsible for a Chinese subcontractor’s medical bills after the worker suffered a concussion. The contract construction company – unbeknownst to the manager – had literally hired the worker off the street to build an aluminum shack to house a piece of equipment on the shop floor. The worker climbed the top of the shack to prove it was sturdy. He fell through the corrugated roof onto the concrete floor, where he was not found for several hours.

Many Chinese will call the other-worldly sense of risk “The Chinese Way,” as if to justify through self-fulfilling historical precedent the lack of adequate preparation to meet the risks of working with 21st-century technologies. Until those habits have morphed into less harmful patterns of behavior, Western employers have to be sure to have included in labor contracts a clause addressing immediate implications should the employee purposely violate company safety standards.

But accidents do happen. The General Manager of a manufacturing facility in China with an extraordinarily high staff retention rate told me the company needs to seriously look at and revise if necessary the safety systems it has in place when there is an accident. “If a worker gets some glue in her eye,” the GM told me, “I want my core team to look at how that happened to one of my people. The system failed. I do not want my people to be afraid of working here. Fix the system.”

Of course, in China, that’s easier said than done.

Copyright ©William R. Dodson, 2008