Coal miners working in northern China's Shanxi Province will
rotate on four six-hour shifts daily for five days a week starting
this year, official Xinhua News Agency reports on Wednesday.
The previous arrangement of three shifts of eight hours a day,
which has been in practice for a long time, will be terminated,
according to the newly promulgated provincial regulation on the
operation standards of coal mining enterprises.
The provincial bureau of coal industry says that with the
eight-hour working shifts, it typically takes ten hours from the
time a miner gets down to the mine and comes back again at the end
of the shift.
The shift will be eleven hours if taking into account the time
for pre-shift meetings and after-shift showers. Some small coal
mines even operate on two shifts of twelve hours each. The extended
shifts and hard labor naturally lead to on-work exhaustion, which
greatly increases the likelihood of coal mining accidents, the
report says.
Besides the change of work shifts, the regulation also
designates the minimum wages for underground miners and stipulates
that the special hardship allowances for them must be paid out in
full and on time.
The regulation also requires coal mining enterprises to provide
dormitories for single miners and their bathhouses, canteens and
meals must meet hygiene standards.
Over thirty coal mines in the provincial capital city of Taiyuan
have already begun to follow the new regulation, the report
says.
China has been striving to improve work safety in its
accident-prone coal mines. But accidents were still frequent as
enforcement was lax and mine owners pushed production beyond safety
limits to earn higher profits.
A gas explosion in early December last year killed 105 miners in
a coal mine in Shanxi, China's largest coal producing province.
(CRI January 10, 2008)