Loretta Tofani
The Salt Lake Tribune

Citation
Loretta Tofani had been a foreign correspondent in China in the 1990s, but it was not until she left journalism and started an import business that she got a first-hand look at the working conditions in Chinese factories making products headed for the United States. She saw workers using carcinogens without masks or ventilation equipment and workers losing limbs in old machinery lacking safety guards. Tofani closed her business and began reporting the story. She sent inquiries to several newspapers, but they all turned her down. Undaunted, she kept reporting, traveling to China five times to interview workers, obtain medical records, and dodge state security officials trying to harass her. In the end, she found a home for her work in The Salt Lake Tribune. Her four-part series is a tribute to her persistence, resourcefulness, and moral courage.

Excerpt
The Human Cost of Doing Business
October 21, 2007
The patients arrive every day in Chinese hospitals with disabling and fatal diseases acquired while making products for America.
On the sixth floor of the Guangzhou Occupational Disease and Prevention Hospital, Wei Chaihua, 44, sits on his iron-rail bed, tethered to an oxygen tank. He is dying of the lung disease silicosis, a result of making Char-Broil gas stoves sold in Utah and throughout the U.S.
Down the hall, He Yuyun, 36, who for years brushed America's furniture with paint containing benzene and other solvents, receives treatment for myelodysplastic anemia, a precursor to leukemia.
In another room rests Xiang Zhiqing, 39, her hair falling out and her kidneys beginning to fail from prolonged exposure to cadmium, which she placed in batteries sent to the U.S.
"Do people in your country handle cadmium while they make batteries?"
Xiang asks. "Do they also die from this?"
With each new report of lead detected on a made-in-China toy, Americans express outrage: These toys could poison children. But Chinese workers making the toys-and countless other products for America-touch and inhale carcinogenic materials every day, all day long. Benzene. Lead. Cadmium. Toluene. Nickel. Mercury.
Many are dying. They have fatal occupational diseases.
Mostly they are young, in their 20s and 30s and 40s. But they are facing slow difficult deaths, caused by the hazardous substances they use to make products for the world-and for America. Some say these workers are paying the real price for America's cheap goods from China.
"In terms of responsibility to Chinese society, this is a big problem for Americans," said Zhou Litai, a lawyer from the city of Chongqing who has represented tens of thousands of dying workers in Chinese courts.
The toxins and hazards exist in virtually every industry, including furniture, shoes, car parts, electronic items, jewelry, clothes, toys and batteries, interviews with workers confirm. The interviews were corroborated by legal documents, medical journal articles, medical records, import documents and official Chinese reports.
Although these products are being made for America, most Chinese workers lack the health protections that for nearly half a century have protected U.S. workers, such as correct protective masks, booths that limit the spread of sprayed chemicals, proper ventilation systems and enforcement to ensure that the employees' exposure to toxins will be limited to permissible doses measured in micrograms or milligrams.
Chinese workers also routinely lose fingers or arms while making American furniture, appliances and other metal goods. Their machines are too old to function properly or they lack safety guards required in the U.S.
In most cases, U.S. companies do not own these factories. American and multinational companies pay the factories to make products for America. From tiny A to Z Mining Tools in St. George to multinational corporations such as Reebok and IKEA, companies compete in the global marketplace by reducing costs-and that usually means outsourcing manufacturing to China. Last year, the U.S. imported $287.8 billion in goods from China, up from $51.5 billion a decade ago, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Those imports are expected only to increase.

Biography
Before beginning her current freelance career, Loretta Tofani worked for 9 years as a staff writer for The Washington Post and 14 years as a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Tofani earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her investigative series documenting a pattern of widespread gang rape inside a Maryland jail. She qualified as a finalist for another Pulitzer in 1989 and three years later, was named The Philadelphia Inquirer's Asia correspondent, based in Beijing, from 1992 to 1996. Tofani was a Fulbright scholar in Japan after earning her bachelor's degree from Fordham University in New York City and her master's in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2001, Tofani moved with her family to Utah where she currently resides.