Companies that violate safety and health obligations and lose three or more workers to industrial accidents within a single year will face fines of up to 5% of their operating profit. Applying recent data, some 30 companies could have fallen within the scope of the new penalty.
The Ministry of Employment and Labor said on the 1st that a bill amending the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed the National Assembly's plenary session. The legislation follows up on the comprehensive labor safety package the government announced in September last year.
The new penalty system is designed to sharply increase the financial burden on employers. For major fatal accidents in which three or more workers die in a year because of violations of safety and health obligations, the ceiling has been raised to 5% of operating profit. The labor ministry plans to set detailed assessment standards that take into account company size and the severity of the violation, and to channel the full amount collected into the industrial accident compensation insurance fund for reinvestment in accident prevention programs. According to Rep. Kim Wi-sang of the People Power Party, 29 companies — counting repeat cases — recorded three or more worker deaths in a single year between January 2022, when the Serious Accidents Punishment Act took effect, and 2024. Those companies will not be subject to the new fines, however, because the measure cannot be applied retroactively.
The right to halt work at job sites and the grounds for invoking it have also been significantly expanded. Workers, worker representatives and honorary industrial safety supervisors will be able to demand that employers stop work not only when there is an imminent risk of an industrial accident but also when such an accident is feared. The law also now explicitly grants subcontracted workers the right to demand a work stoppage directly from the prime contractor or to evacuate on their own.
The scope for intervention by administrative authorities has widened as well. The grounds for the labor minister to order a work stoppage will expand from the current standard of a serious accident having occurred to cases in which a worker has been injured and is unconscious or whose survival is unclear. In addition, employers who fail to comply with corrective orders — such as installing safety railings — and thereby leave an imminent risk of an industrial accident will be newly barred from resuming work until the corrections are complete.
Administrative sanctions for repeated serious accidents at the same workplace will also be strengthened. The measure applies to workplaces that have received two or more business suspension orders within three years over industrial accidents in which two or more workers died at once because of safety and health violations. If such a workplace becomes subject to suspension again, the labor minister now has a legal basis to ask the relevant administrative agencies to cancel or revoke its business registration.
Some question how effective the registration cancellation system will be. According to Rep. Lee Yong-woo of the Democratic Party of Korea, 11 construction companies have received business suspension orders over the past three years. "To meet the requirements for registration cancellation, a company would have to face business suspension three times within the same period," Lee said at the plenary session that day. "Judging by government statistics, it is in practice unlikely that such workplaces will emerge."
Rules were also revised to ease safety costs and schedule pressure at construction sites. The obligation to set aside occupational safety and health management expenses will expand from construction project owners to prime contractors and to industries outside construction. Extreme heat and cold waves were added to the force majeure grounds on which a prime contractor can request an extension of the construction period.
A reward system for reporting violations of the occupational safety law will be introduced three months after promulgation to raise awareness of compliance. At the same time, the scope of exemptions from safety certification was broadened for machinery and other equipment imported for export purposes, in order to reduce unnecessary administrative burdens and delivery times for companies. A Safe Workplace Committee reporting directly to the minister, bringing together labor, management and government to deliberate on key policies such as the basic plan for industrial accident prevention, will also be established.
"Making sure that people are not hurt or killed at the workplaces they go to in order to make a living is a basic duty of the government," Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon said. "We will do our utmost to ensure the new system takes hold on the ground, including by overhauling subordinate regulations."
