The death toll in yesterday’s explosion at a fireworks factory in northeastern China has risen to 19, with more than 150 injured or missing. It is still not known for sure how many workers were in the factory at the time.

The standard compensation award for work-related injuries and death will be substantially increased next year, the state council announced Monday 26 July. From 1 January 2011, the basic one-time compensation award for work-related death will be raised from 200,000 yuan to 343,500 yuan. And when funeral expenses and monthly pension payments to the relatives of the deceased are included, the total payment will come to around 618,000 yuan on average.

Chinese migrant laborers toiling in the factories of two major firms won unusually hefty raises in recent weeks, as Honda sought to end strikes and Foxconn, maker of the Apple iPad, tried to stave off criticism over a spate of worker suicides. But multinationals that find themselves backed into a corner are not the only ones starting to heed the demands of increasingly emboldened employees. In some instances government officials here in China’s southern factory belt, Guangdong Province, have also made small concessions as more workers stage sit-ins and pursue legal channels for compensation.

A retired miner from Sichuan with stage-three pneumoconiosis, who has been seeking occupational illness compensation from his former employer for the past three years, has finally been awarded 136,000 yuan in a court mediated settlement Xiao Huazhong had been seeking 190,000 yuan, the amount he should be legally entitled to, but accepted the lower award because he is currently seriously ill in hospital, has already spent his entire life savings of around 80,000 yuan on medical care, and is faced with additional hospital bills of several hundred yuan a day.

When Xia Shihua was disabled in a mining accident, he sued the mine for compensation but was frustrated on three occasions by the obstacles thrown in his way by the courts and his former employer.

Yang Renbing is still in his 30s, but already his body has suffered damage from which it will not recover. For more than a decade, he worked in a jewellery factory in southern China where he inhaled dust that has permanently damaged his lungs. Mr Yang, 34, is one of what campaigners estimate to be more than one million people to have developed an often deadly condition called pneumoconiosis as a result of his working conditions.

Beijing-based journalist, David Yang recently investigated the case of a battery factory worker in the northeastern province of Jilin who was diagnosed with acute lead poisoning and renal failure but could not get adequate compensation because the authorities, apparently in collusion with his employer, refused to classify his injury as work-related.

Han Dongfang talks to a group of migrant workers who contracted the deadly lung disease pneumoconiosis whilst working as explosives and drill operators on Shenzhen’s construction sites in the 1990s.

CLB’s latest research report The Hard Road: Seeking justice for victims of pneumoconiosis in China was highlighted in the print edition of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on 8 May 2010.