Record an instance of a work-related injury

free discussion
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I recently worked at a lemon tea shop, mainly making cold drinks. The weather was rather cold, the shop wasn’t busy. In this shop I began to enjoy a period of ease and leisure; during this time, in the spare moments between work, I would doze off, watch videos, and even increased my bad habits like porn consumption and masturbation. I did not check labor reform and ideological struggle to study theory and go to forums to交流 more with everyone when I had time. In such idle work, I was eroded by bourgeois culture, and my thoughts deteriorated quickly, becoming lazy and unwilling to communicate more with coworkers. When I was on shift with a female coworker, I had nothing to promote to her. Everyday life was finishing the morning shift together, then I would watch videos on one side while she looked at her phone on the other. Such a life was almost completely disconnected from the proletariat.

But this job gradually became busy with the heat. Our shop used to open at 10 a.m. and I would finish at 6 p.m.; our shop’s revenue was only a few hundred yuan, about a dozen glasses. On Sunday, 3/19, the weather cleared and our business picked up. From 9 a.m. to a little after 1 p.m., orders kept coming in. It was very busy at that time; many customers came in person. They saw I was the only one working, but they kept rushing me; it was disgusting, and I simply couldn’t handle it.

In such a frenzied moment, while I was cutting fruit, I accidentally cut my own finger. My mind was still thinking about the job, and suddenly it felt like an electric shock. I let out a scream and jerked my hand back. When I looked, the injury on my left ring finger extended from the fingerprint side to the nail bed, the wound was deep, and there was a lot of bleeding. I panicked a bit, called my shop manager and explained the situation, then hurried to the hospital for stitching. But as this scene unfolded, those customers who normally only know how to eat and drink, the usual brutes, acted as if they hadn’t seen my injury. A couple heard my scream, and even though they saw my bloodied hand, they said, “Did our cup get made?,” “Mine has already been plated; can it be refunded?” It was always about their own enjoyment, with no regard for others, extremely cold.

Along the way I went to a traditional Chinese medicine clinic. I hoped they could disinfect, bandage, and stop the bleeding, but the clinic didn’t handle external injuries. I had to go to a nearby community clinic to get treated, then take a taxi to the hospital. I thought to myself, if I were a worker with elderly parents and young children to care for, I would feel helpless. It’s hard to say whether this work injury would be compensated; in the next few days I surely wouldn’t be able to work, and if I had debts or something, it would be even worse. Later I went to the hospital’s plastic surgery department for stitching. In addition to the medicine, it cost a total of 480 yuan. While stitching, I asked my shop manager whether this counted as a work injury, and he bluntly said, “Isn’t it normal to get injured while working in the shop? What work injury? I ask you, do you want to work or not?” Fk, I was injured in the shop, paying 480 yuan for stitches in the hospital. If this isn’t a work injury, what is it? Do you mean I should just work or get lost? “Shop manager, don’t talk to me like that. I’m not in debt to you.” I said, “I’m at the hospital now, I won’t argue, I’ll come back to find you later.” After the stitching, I rushed to the shop. mid-shift the boss called me and said, “This situation cannot be reimbursed; you should go to the surgical department, not the plastics department. Your condition doesn’t require 400 yuan for stitching.” Fk, where does such a legal standard exist? The boss finally said to go through the proper process. I went straight back to the shop to prepare to resume work, but the boss was already waiting there. Before I could say anything, he preemptively said, “In this situation I can reimburse the stitching cost, but we can’t reimburse the medication.” I said, “First reimburse what you can.” Boss: “But there’s a condition—you must apologize to our staff, and then I’ll reimburse, otherwise I’ll report you.” Where is such a reasoning? He refused to report me as a work injury, so why should I apologize? I will not apologize. Whether I apologize or not, you must reimburse me. Damn, he acted like he was fair, saying everything could be resolved amicably, clearly trying not to reimburse the work injury while also firing me. The current situation is that while they didn’t report the work injury, they also didn’t grant the leave for the injury. If I can’t return to work within a week, or if they hire someone else within a week, they will fire me. I’ve already filed a work injury report on my own. Next, I can only go to labor arbitration.

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These beasts are really damned, they do nothing all day but feed on the blood of the people

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I feel we should just go smash that stupid store directly, and not apologize to the so-called staff. We were already being exploited; the boss is a parasite who lives off the surplus value of workers. He obviously wants to use this to divide skilled and unskilled workers. We can’t sacrifice the whole movement for the sake of some so-called compensation in front of us.

I don’t know how things are going with what you mentioned, but I think in such a situation if you don’t go to confront it, this store might think you’re easy to bully in the future and then aggressively intensify the oppression against you.

My idea is that when the time comes, we should take advantage of the fact that I am currently injured and go to the store entrance to stage a talk, to tell about the oppression and slavery I experienced while working in this shop, and how I was discarded like garbage by the capitalist class merely for creating profits for capitalists under the capitalist system, and we can also collect the reactionary remarks of these capitalists and traitors, and no matter what we do, we must impact this beast of a shop—it’s truly disgusting.

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I went once, but at the time I felt bad because I indulged myself during this period, so I decided to keep fighting. I was thinking that if I could wait until this weekend to go again, it would be great to push them to apply for occupational injury benefits for me or to push them to fire me.

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I once had another incident, cutting lemons and oranges in a milk tea shop. It wasn’t as bad as you might think; I only cut off a small piece of my nail, it bled a little, but then a colleague noticed that I was slow and told the boss something. That nasty boss then brought out the cutting machine. I was at a loss for words. There was already a machine, yet I was still told to cut more than ten or so pieces. I asked her why not use the machine, and she said “too little, hard to cut,” and even claimed that the cutting machine was very sharp (in reality the blade was well protected). Basically, they just don’t want to spend the electricity or money, so they make us cut things ourselves.

And logically, there should have been a spare prepared, but milk tea shop orders are unstable; it’s often just one person asking for lemon water, and it has to be cut, and it’s very urgent. Sometimes it’s not because our own cutting skills are poor, because injuries to fingers happen all the time; it’s because they’re too good at “delicately” exploiting every minute and every second.

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This capitalist clots for himself to cheat workers by underreporting reimbursements. Stitching comes in two types: ordinary suturing and cosmetic suturing (using absorbable thread layer by layer). The latter is more expensive but less likely to cause scarring and sequelae, whereas the former may result in larger scars and discomfort when exposed to external stimuli.