Economic considerations should not be perceived as a cure-all to ensure workplace safety nationwide.

But measures like raising compensation standards for victims of industrial accidents are necessary to make irresponsible employers more accountable.

Wang Xianzheng, director of the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS), pointedly stressed economic measures as one of the primary means to improve work safety at a national work conference on Tuesday.

This is a clear signal that the authorities are beginning to address work safety problems from a long-term perspective after many stopgap efforts.

Statistics for 2003 indicate the country's death toll from industrial accidents and the number of explosions in coal mines dropped by 7.4 percent and 6.6 percent respectively from the previous year.

Still, the fatal gas field blowout in southwestern China's Chongqing Municipality in late December that claimed 243 lives, the worst of its kind in China, underlined the deplorable state of the nation's workplace safety standards.

The State Council's decision last month to bolster work safety standards reflected the sense of public urgency aroused by these frequent accidents.

Unfortunately, successive campaigns to raise work safety awareness and tighten supervision in the wake of workplace tragedies have for the most part failed to prevent similar calamities from occurring.

One of the key reasons behind many employers' reluctance to adopt necessary safety measures is their concern for cost.

A combination of lax supervision on workplace safety and inadequate protection of worker's interests and rights has enticed some employers to seek profits at the cost of workers' safety.

Sadder than those industrial accidents is the fact that, sometimes, bosses easily escaped culpability by only paying victims a sum of compensation not worthy of mentioning in the same breath as the amount of profits they had reaped.

Disproportional punishment has failed to check the wrongdoing.

More effort is needed to strike at the root of irresponsible employers' favouring of profits over workers' safety.

Economic measures such as collecting safety fees from enterprises engaged in dangerous production and raising funds from related enterprises as a pledge for work safety risks could help ensure financial preparation for rescue and relief work.

Moreover, to allow victims or their families to pursue more compensation other than industrial injury insurance will definitely force employers to take the issue more seriously.

If such punitive compensations can be raised to a high enough level, employers will think twice about the cost of saving investment on workplace safety.

Only when employers are willing to increase work safety investment and take preventive measures can the number of industrial accidents be effectively reduced.

To that end, authorities should give more attention to economic measures as a critical leverage to improve the nation's record on workplace safety.

(China Daily February 19, 2004)