Preventing Falls and Crushing Accidents... Unannounced On-Site Inspections at Small and Medium Workplaces Nationwide

Safety and Health Agency patrol field inspection team members conducting a safety inspection at a construction site. (Photo by Safety and Health Agency)

[Asia Economy Reporter Moon Chaeseok] The Ministry of Employment and Labor and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency announced on the 3rd that they will implement 'Patrol On-site Inspections' to prevent industrial accident fatalities.

Patrol On-site Inspections are a project in which the agency conducts surprise inspections of small and medium-sized workplaces to eradicate major hazard factors such as falls and entrapments.

They check for fall and entrapment accident prevention measures and compliance with mandatory safety protective equipment usage.

First, the agency plans to increase the number of on-site inspections from 60,000 last year to 70,000 this year, and deploy 404 patrol-dedicated vehicles, an increase of 296 from last year.

Inspections to prevent large-scale accidents such as fires and explosions will be conducted simultaneously.

In the construction industry, inspections will target sites with a project scale under 12 billion KRW, focusing on supervising high-risk tasks such as steel frame and truss work at sites under 5 billion KRW where accident fatalities are increasing.

For manufacturing, inspections will target workplaces with fewer than 50 employees that possess ten major hazardous machines such as conveyors.

After on-site inspections, the agency will support costs for improving hazard factors at small workplaces with weak safety and link to Ministry of Employment and Labor supervision if improvements are not made.

For construction sites under 5 billion KRW, safety facilities such as system scaffolding for fall prevention will be supported up to 30 million KRW, and manufacturing workplaces with fewer than 50 employees will be supported up to 100 million KRW for replacing hazardous machines and improving outdated hazardous processes.

Park Duyong, Director of the agency, said, "To reduce accident fatalities, it is necessary to intensively manage core hazard factors such as falls in construction and entrapments in manufacturing through patrol on-site inspections."

Director Park also stated, "We will do our best to ensure safety functions properly on-site while simultaneously providing financial support for hazard factor improvements."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.