The term ‘worker’ has emerged with the dawn of capitalism. It lexically means a person who maintains a living with wages earned from selling labor. Commonly, people conjure up the image of workers who are working at factories or construction sites. However, worker includes a person who works in various forms for financial returns like an office job, education job, police and etc. Likewise, the productive activities that are routinely completed for a living are called ‘industry.’ The word includes various fields like agriculture, fishing, manufacturing, construction, distribution, insurance, service industries, and etc. Unfortunately, workers sometimes suffer from injury, disease and even death because of their tasks, while offering labor. This is called ‘industrial accidents.’ Serious loss of lives happens continuously owing to facility manager’s insufficient safety measures. Whenever such casualties occur, companies and society investigate the situation, punish the person in charge, and compensate the victim. Furthermore, legislation is often introduced to prevent the reoccurrence of same tragedies. Despite all these efforts, however, the number of casualties has risen rather than decreased. According to the Ministry of Employment and Labor’s casualty statistics, in 2020, 882 people died from industrial accidents, up 3.2 percent from 2019.

  The Government has been legislating to reduce workers’ industry accidents. In this case, ‘worker’ means a person who works at the business with 5 or more other people at all times. The law named ‘Occupation Safety and Health Acts’ is the most representative law in this category. This law was enacted to prevent industrial accidents by establishing and maintaining standards for the safety and health of industries. However, loopholes in the law were revealed due to the existence of blind spots for protection targets, weak levels of punishment and ambiguity of industrial accident recognition standards. Also, this law didn’t assert much effect on reducing industrial accidents. To make up for this, the scope of the law was expanded and the level of fines and prison sentences were raised if contractors violate their obligations of safety and protection. In addition, industrial accidents were recognized only working at hazardous locations under certain conditions. The law was amended to take responsibility for workers’ safety regardless of hazardous locations, the purpose of the project, type of contract, and etc. Other Laws have also been amended since January last year. Together with these law, the ‘Serious Accident Punishment Act’ was enacted in January of this year for surely reducing industrial accidents. The law was enacted to ensure the safety of workers by business owners by strengthening ‘punishment and responsibility’ for the occurrence of industrial accidents. Eventually, the law aims to fundamentally prevent industrial disasters from allowing companies to invest more for safety and making punishment stricter.

  The above two laws have industrial accidents prevention in common, so it’s needed to highlight specific differences between the two laws. For this, Choi Sang-hoe, who is a liberal arts lecturer at the Chungbuk National University Creative Convergence Headquarters, commented, “ ‘The Occupation Safety And Health Acts’ is for the prevention of industrial accidents and ‘The Serious Accident Punishment Act’ is for the punishment of business owners who have caused serious accidents.”

  To prevent continuous industrial accidents, these two laws were enacted. Despite the fact that the purpose and intent of the two laws are valid, there are limits to preventing industrial accidents. The biggest problems of the ‘Serious Accident Punishment Act’ are ‘The exclusion of a mandatory 2-member system’ and the fact that ‘cardiovascular disease, caused by overwork is excluded from the legal application.’ Among the representative examples of industrial accidents, many accidents and serious damage could have been prevented if the labor was carried out in pairs. However, a clause has been made to appoint a general manager instead of a ‘2-member mandatory team.’ There is a limit to solve the root cause of the accident. Also, throughout the industry hundreds of people die from cardiovascular disease a year. This cardiovascular disease is mainly caused by overwork. However, the law excluded the disease from the disease category by reason of genetic and personal characteristic. In the end, there is no legal basis to punish accidents caused by overwork. For these reasons, controversy is brewing over the effectiveness of the law.

  The ‘Serious Accident Punishment Act’ will soon be finalized and implemented step by step from January next year. However, there is still controversy over whether the above provisions should be amended. Since the law is the biggest factor in determining the employer’s ‘punishment,’ clarity of standards is the most essential for the standard of punishment. Therefore, there is a difference of views between the business community and the labor community. Even through, since the law was created fundamentally to prevent serious accidents, it should compromise the opinions of workers and management to prepare an enforcement ordinance to prevent industrial accidents. Life is an irreplaceable asset. Therefore,  laws that can protect the safety of workers should be in place to ensure that this value can not neutralized, making it a safe society for everyone.

By Choi Yeong-eun l duddms8640@cbnu.ac.kr