Work safety will become an important factor in evaluating the performance of local officials, Premier Wen Jiabao said yesterday.

"Chief leaders in a province, city, county or township are also responsible for work safety of that region," Wen told representatives attending a national conference on work safety.

The legal representative of an enterprise must take responsibility when dealing with work safety issues, he added.

Workplace safety has not been given enough attention in past years, and the situation is far from satisfactory, experts said.

The premier urged all levels of government to implement safety-oriented economic policies when seeking economic and social development.

"Work safety is a major factor of economic development, and we should prevent the damage of people's interests and the sacrifice of workers' lives," Wen said.

Work safety funds and compensation systems should be established on the basis of a stimulus-and-punishment mechanism, he said.

Wen suggested that measures be accelerated to encourage reform of coal mines.

The State-owned coal mining enterprises should take the opportunities available to increase the level of their work safety infrastructures in the coming years, Wen said.

Statistics indicate that the coal output in 2005 was 2.11 billion tons, which is 7.9 per cent higher than in 2004, according to Zhao Tiechui, director of the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety. But 2005 also saw 3,341 various colliery accidents, which killed 5,986 miners.

To improve the situation, work safety watchdogs around the nation closed down more than 4,000 coal mines last year, according to Zhao's administration.

Work safety authorities will adopt an annual supervision system to ensure that coal mining enterprises with work safety certificates do meet all the requirements for a safe workplace, Zhao told reporters.

Meanwhile, the ongoing campaign to shut down unqualified coal mines will not influence the coal supply as a whole, Zhao said.

"By the end of 2005, the stock of coal reached 140 million tons, or 35.3 per cent more than that of the previous year," he said. "Besides, the total production capacity of those closed mines is less than 50 million tons."

At the same time, the nation will witness the increase of another 100 million tons of coal production, because of the reconstruction and expansion efforts of collieries in 2006, the official said.

Source: China Daily