As he lay dying because he had been made to work in toxic factories since childhood, a porcelain worker known to history only as "M L" wrote: "Accursed society, you are responsible for my illness.
Valencia has a tradition of small-scale companies making textiles, tiles and porcelain, often employing workers for cash wages.
The effort — about five hours' worth — resulted in 46 bags of woody debris, much of it tangled bunches of porcelain berry that workers had hacked off trees and bushes.
A Russian imperial porcelain plate showing a Leninist worker trampling on capital and taking over a factory is one starting point, as is a suffragette penny, with "Votes for Women" stamped across the head of King Edward VII.
While fixing the floor in the green bathroom, one worker assumed the green porcelain bathtub would get the heave-ho, so he broke it up with a sledgehammer.
Another study showed that subjective symptoms of shoulder pain, lower back pain and thirst in 151 workers in steel, glass and porcelain manufacturing plants were related to high WBGT indexes (range: 19.6 34.6°C) at their worksites (16).
They were produced by 1,600 (mostly female) workers living in the ancient porcelain-producing town of Jingdezhen.
"We're going to be swamped," said Kris Curtis, one of the dozen or so workers who produce up to 200,000 aluminum and porcelain signs a year.
As demand boomed, Jingdezhen's workshops grew increasingly specialized — each porcelain piece passed through the hands of roughly 70 craftsmen, with some workers just painting blue rims on bowls.
Gucci, which is owned by the French company PPR, said in Milan that it would financially restructure the porcelain brand and improve its outdated factory in Sesto Fiorentino, just outside Florence, where workers have been protesting daily since January.
