A group of 28 factory workers in east China tried to commit mass suicide by jumping off a building in protest against poor retirement benefits, a rights group said on Tuesday.
They were stopped by police, but one of their colleagues was hospitalised after drinking pesticide in a subsequent protest, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy
said.
The woman, an employee at Yanwu Group, a state-owned acoustics equipment factory in Jiangsu province, was now out of danger after drinking the poison on Thursday, a hospital worker said.
”She should be able to go home tomorrow,” a member of staff at the Number Three Hospital in Yancheng city told AFP, confirming the suicide attempt.
The factory, also in Yancheng, is going bankrupt and has had to reduce its staff from 2 000 workers to 200, according to a city government official.
The protestors are a group of about 100 retirees who had worked at the company for 20 years or longer but were receiving minimal compensation following the redundancies, the Information Center said.
It has repeatedly demanded the city government pay them pensions and medical insurance, which has been refused.
Their plight mirrors that of millions of people laid off around China in recent years as vast numbers of ailing state-run firms go out of business.
The dramatic protest also shows the desperate lengths to which some workers will go, highlighting what many observers say is a potential cause of serious social unrest in China over the coming years.
Twenty-eight of the group climbed to the roof of a nine-story building in the city center on July 23 and tried to put pressure on city officials by attempting to kill themselves by jumping off the building, said Information Center director Frank Lu.
They were stopped by police, who detained three of them, Lu said.
The workers wanted to organise another such attempt on August 10 but police prevented them from leaving their homes, he added.
Then on Thursday, the woman worker and several dozen colleagues went to the city government office to protest, where she drank the pesticide.
Police are watching workers’ homes around the clock for fear they will try to commit suicide again, Lu said.
The company could not be immediately reached for comment.
The city government official, who gave only his surname Zhao, denied any workers tried to jump off a building but said they had held sit-ins outside government offices.
”No such thing happened. It’s impossible,” said the official, saying two workers were detained by police.
Many failing state-owned firms cannot or do not pay workers adequate compensation for lay-offs or early retirement.
Rampant corruption and ineptitude has made workers even more angry, resulting in frequent labor unrest, such as large-scale demonstrations in China’s northeastern rust belt earlier this year. – Sapa-AFP