Letter to Gold Peak Industries Chairman Mr. Victor Lo

Today is GP’s annual shareholder meeting. Once again the GP Cadmium Poisoning Coalition stages a protest against your company, which continues to poison many workers with cadmium in your plants in mainland China. The Coalition urges GP to accept the workers’ major demands.

Gold Peak Industries (Holdings) Hong Kong owns GP batteries in China and as such has direct responsibility. As a result of GPs long-term negligence in production safety, many workers were found to have been poisoned through their work at GP:

21 workers from three mainland GP plants and three workers from GP plants in Hong Kong are affected by cadmium poisoning.
Several hundred workers from the mainland and 21 workers from Hong Kong are still found to have excessive cadmium levels and have been placed under observation.
The increasing number of workers, from two to 21, being poisoned by cadmium shows that the incident is expanding and deepening, instead of diminishing and being resolved. Although your company has said you will always take care of the workers, evidence shows that your company is not responsible enough. For example, Xiang Zhiqing, an ex-GP worker being diagnosed as cadmium poisoning in early 2006 had to fight for more than one year before being accepted as a victim of cadmium poisoning. Ex-GP workers with excessive cadmium levels have been highly discriminated against by the GP management. For example, the treatment between those who joined the collective (148 workers) court case demanding legal and qualified body check ups and those who did not joined is different—the check up forms were different, reimbursements and meals were not as good as those involved in the court case. Evidence shows that even for a small legitimate right, GP wants the workers to file a court case to fight for it. This leads to the exhaustion of workers’ time, money and energy. Is this a responsible way of solving the problem?