Why an industrial accident could mean a life of pain and poverty for Hong Kong construction workers
- There were 3,541 reported cases of construction workers being injured on the job in Hong Kong last year
- City’s leader Carrie Lam recently announced a three-year pilot work injury rehabilitation programme in industry
When Hong Kong construction worker David Wong (not his real name) fell 1.5 metres from a crane and landed flat on his back on a loading truck in 2017, he could not have imagined two years on, he would still be suffering from the work injury, and worse still, left impoverished by it.
Despite bumping his head and back and getting a swollen left hand immediately after the accident, the father of one returned to work a week later, after getting Chinese medicine treatment.
Wong, 50, soldiered on for six months until one day in April 2018 when he felt acute pain in his waist.
He was given a painkiller and told to wait two years for a public specialist’s appointment. Unable to stand the pain any longer and anxious to resume work, Wong spent HK$130,000 (US$16,670) from his savings and from loans for orthopaedic surgery at a private hospital to remove a herniated disc that compressed his spinal nerve, causing back pain.
“No one could tell me what went wrong, but I came out of the operating theatre still feeling the same pain. So I ended up skint and in debt, and back on the queue for a public specialist.”
