President Xi Jinping on Friday called for tighter supervision of safety measures at workplaces as China gears up to resume work and production in a big way after over two months of battle against the coronavirus pandemic.
Xi asked officials to strengthen monitoring and law enforcement of production safety even as coronavirus cases began to rise again in China following the return of Chinese nationals from abroad in big numbers. “Authorities should firmly hold the bottom line of workplace safety,” Xi was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency on Friday.
Noting that the country had made progress in workplace safety last year with the number of accidents declining, Xi said there remained many risks and much work is yet to be done.
Workplace safety must not be regarded as a trivial matter or treated with formalism or bureaucracy, Xi said.
In view of the main features and outstanding problems in workplace safety, Xi said efforts should be made to improve the responsibility system, ensure strict rectification of problems found, and strengthen risk prevention and control so that hidden dangers could be fundamentally eliminated and major accidents effectively curbed.
Premier Li Keqiang, who headed the leading officials group to control COVID-19 also said officials must not let up on workplace safety at a time when the country is in a critical period of coordinating epidemic control and work resumption.