26 No Choice but to Fight: Chinese battery women workers' struggle for health and dignity Pub Globalization Monitor. £6.50 from Resistance Books or HK$96 inc postage from [email protected]. Reviewed by Kathy Lowe Few of the workers' struggles currently spreading across China have made more impact internationally than that of the battery workers in Gold Peak Industries. They were young migrants from rural China, mainly women, with no experience of organising and no independent trade union to represent them. Yet they dared to take on this powerful Asia-based multinational, exposed the scandal of cadmium poisoning in China's battery industry and challenged the Chinese authorities to entorce safety regulations. Globalization Monitor, a non-profit organisation in Hong Kong, has helped the women to tell their story in No Choice but to Fight. The book shows how the long battle that started in 2003 has become something of a cause celebre among trade unions, green China makes half the world's batteries and also consumes half the world's cadmium to subsidiaries where the women worked are in the industrialised zone of the Pearl River Delta in the south of mainland China. The other factory is located in Hong Kong where Gold Peak has its headquarters. Gold Peak employees were working with minimal protection in workshops full of fine toxic cadmium dust, suffering nausea and headaches. They did not know that long-term exposure to the dust could poison them, causing lasting damage to organs and bones After finally conceding to their requests for health checks management still refused to disclose the test results, forcing some worried workers to pay for private tests. Those worst affected who were hospitalised used the time to study employment law and regulations governing health and safety, preparing for the fight ahead As the book explains, the workers were outraged when they realised that it would have been neither expensive nor complicated for their bosses to clean up their working environment and provide them with full protective clothing. The company, they concluded, "preferred to violate regulations to keep unit costs down and profits up" Their anger spurred them into audacious protests throughout 2004/5: go-slows, demonstrations, sit-ins and strike action. They confronted local and provincial officials who colluded with the company by neglecting to enforce safety laws and even sent a delegation to Beijing to press their demands for access to medical care and fair compensation. Meanwhile the media in China, Hong Kong and abroad had picked up the story and a report by Greenpeace drew attention to widespread environmental contamination caused by cadmium. Some safety improvements and agreements on regular health checks were finally achieved but compensation remained a sticking point with
Review: No Choice but to Fight
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