"Printed in the Los Angeles Times was an article about the deaths of five girls who were child laborers in Beixin-Zhuang , China , and the cover-ups by their employers. A couple of days before Christmas, it was a little past one in the morning, and after a long, twelve hour shift, the five girls went back to their rooms. After burning some coal, they warmed up their room and fell asleep, but never woke up. It was said that the fumes had poisoned them, but there was more to it than that. The owner of the canvas-making factory was supposedly scared to find the girls unconscious, especially because three of them were underage workers. Because of this, he put them into their caskets while still alive. “'You see the damage on the corner of the box, the bruises on the side of her head, and the vomit in her hair?' said Jia Haimin, the mother of 14-year-old Wang Yajuan, pointing to pictures of her daughter lying in a cardboard casket stained with vomit and appearing to show evidence of a struggle. ‘Dead people can't bang their heads against the box. Dead people can't vomit. My child was still alive when they put her in there.'” Because school tuition in rural areas cost about $300 per person, many rural girls drop out of school because their parents need their help, and they can't afford tuition for more than one child. Jia Wanyun, 14, who was one of the five girls who died in the canvas-making factory, started working there only a month before her death. She was promised $100 a year, but hadn't been paid anything because she was still an apprentice. As an apprentice however, she still worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. At the end of the trial, the families accepted about $12,000 each and agreed to drop all charges.
The death of these five young girls isn't the only case in which children had died in the line of work. In the Los Angeles Times, there is a story about a mass death within yet another factory. In 2001, an explosion at a rural school killed 42 people, most of them being third and fourth graders. These children were believed to be making fireworks at the time of the blast, forcing you to assume that it was these exact fireworks that they were working on that had killed them. Whether it may have been an accident on their part, or something else, it doesn't erase the fact that a number of third and fourth graders had died on the job."
Isn't that the worst thing you've ever heard! Here is the website, in case you want to read the whole article.
http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/multimedialearning/wkwok/printable%20version.htm
Just keep in mind that if these people didn;t work in these places, they would have no money, so we can't be totally against this. I just think there should be an age you can start working, like here, and way better working conditions.
On that happy note, have a good day, and change the world! (positively please)
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