3 years of serious accident law

[Anchor]

Today (1.27) marks the third anniversary of the enforcement of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act.

While there are evaluations that safety management in companies has improved since the law was enacted, there are also claims that the legal provisions are still insufficient.

We have Kim Chae-rin reporting on the voices from the labor-management field.

[Report]

In Oct. 2022, a worker died after being caught in a machine at an SPC-affiliated bakery.

The responsibility did not fall solely on the on-site manager.

Despite there being 12 incidents of entrapment accidents over three years, there were no measures to prevent recurrence, and the company representative also received a suspended sentence.

The Serious Accidents Punishment Act is the basis for holding not only middle managers but also CEOs legally responsible for serious industrial accidents.

The CEO of Aricell, a primary battery company in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, where 23 people died in a fire, became the first case to be arrested for violating the act.

[Park Soon-kwan/Aricell CEO/Aug. 2024: "(Did you not conduct safety training properly?) …."]

Three years after the law was enacted, a total of 33 representatives of primary contractors have been convicted.

The total number of industrial accident fatalities has decreased for three consecutive years.

This is an evaluation that the law has played a certain role in improving corporate safety management systems.

[Kang Tae-sun/Professor, Department of Safety Management, Seoul Cyber University: "(Serious accidents) have clearly not increased and are decreasing, and I believe this is the effect of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act."]

However, controversy still remains.

Out of the 33 guilty verdicts, only 5 resulted in actual imprisonment.

The labor sector argues that the punishment provisions need to be stricter.

[Choi Myung-sun/Director of the Occupational Safety and Health Office, Korean Confederation of Trade Unions: "Currently, 80% of fines are below 100 million won. We need to revise the law to include minimum fine amounts."]

The business community claims that the responsibility of business owners is defined too broadly in the law and filed a constitutional complaint last year.

[Lim Woo-taek/Director of the Safety and Health Division, Korea Enterprises Federation: "I would like to emphasize that clarity in the law is still needed. The roles and responsibilities of intermediate suppliers in the relationship between primary and secondary contractors are ambiguous…."]

A survey also found that nearly half of the businesses with fewer than 50 employees, which have been subject to the law since last year, have not properly established mandatory safety systems.

This is why both labor and management emphasize the need for government support.

This is Kim Chae-rin from KBS News.