by Kerry Trueman

In all the fuss over the tainted toys, food, and other consumer “goods” from China that fill our store shelves, the emphasis is always on American consumers and the potential harm these shoddy, toxic products pose to our health.

But what about the Chinese workers who are cranking out all this awful stuff? If you think it’s bad for your kid to play with a lead-tainted toy train, imagine how much worse it must be for the people who spend endless hours each day manufacturing this crap.

Pulitzer Prize-winning freelance journalist Loretta Tofani spent more than a year documenting the terrible human toll that our appetite for cheap consumer goods has taken on Chinese workers for a series in the Salt Lake Tribune, “American Imports, Chinese Deaths.”

As Tofani told Judy Woodruff last night on PBS Newshour, unsafe working conditions are standard operating procedure in all kinds of Chinese factories:

“I found that there were carcinogens being used by people, by the workers, in a really extravagant manner. People were spraying benzenes. There were people who had silicosis from making our metal goods.

And it would seem like it was in every industry. It was furniture. It was shoes, clothes, marble tiles, granite countertops. Virtually every industry went through this system, where workers were living and breathing in carcinogens or using machines that were unguarded and resulted in amputations.”

Tofani showed a photograph of a worker spraying lead-based paint in an unventilated factory, with no mask. “So while we’re worried about the lead on our toys, actually, workers are bathing in lead while they’re making our products, not just toys.”

Another photo showed a man sitting on a hospital bed with an oxygen tank nearby. He was dying of silicosis, a fatal lung disease. Tofani told his story:

“He made charbroil stoves for export to the United States. His job was to place the outside of the stove into a machine that sanded the steel, and so tiny fragments of the metal would be in the air, and he breathed in the fragments. He had a mask, but it was not good enough.”

Of course, the lax regulations in Chinese factories are what made it so much cheaper for companies like Mattel to shut down their American factories and set up shop in China instead. Not to rain on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but when Mattel’s Island Princess Barbie float rolls down Broadway tomorrow morning, I’ll be thinking of all those Chinese workers toiling away in their toxic workshops. I wonder how thankful they feel.