Editorial | Mainland officials must heed calls to maintain workplace safety
- An explosion at a pesticide plant in Jiangsu that killed almost 80 people once again underlines that duty of care should come before financial concerns
An aerial view of China’s latest workplace accident in Yancheng, Jiangsu province, looks like a wartime bomb crater surrounded by the devastation of an industrial estate.
The human toll of an explosion at a pesticide plant – at least 78 dead and 640 injured – reinforces the analogy. It is true that industrial disasters can happen anywhere – though not often on a scale as big as this.
When they do, as a rule, investigations establish causes and recommend steps to ensure they do not recur. But the Yancheng blast is not such a one-off.
Tragically, it perpetuates a pattern of deadly negligence of industrial safety hazards on the mainland that has cost hundreds of lives over the past few years.
Those responsible for ignoring warnings from work safety inspections must be punished. But as the latest tragedy shows, accountability alone has not been an effective deterrent in the past to irresponsible laxity that has cost lives.
Work safety inspections must be followed up to ensure prompt compliance with recommendations.