[Square] Swift Industrial Accident Handling Should Not Result in Hasty Approval

Recently, the Ministry of Employment and Labor has been pushing for a revision of the notification standards for recognizing musculoskeletal disorders. The proposed amendment aims to apply the principle of presumption when job type, working period, and validity period criteria are met, thereby omitting on-site investigations of work-relatedness and enabling faster processing of industrial accident claims.

If the amendment is passed, it will have strong binding power in handling musculoskeletal disorder industrial accident claims, so the recognition standards in the amendment must be based on objective data and be acceptable to everyone. However, it appears that the amendment was prepared with insufficient evidence and illogical content, which is deeply concerning.

Specifically, the Ministry of Employment and Labor presents three research service reports as the basis for the amendment. However, these reports show that the classification and selection of job types and the setting of working periods were inappropriately conducted in deriving recognition standards by job type. All three research reports stated that the classification of job types in the collected data was not properly done and that they had to reclassify them, which means there is a very high possibility that arbitrary judgment will also influence job classification when applying the amendment.

Furthermore, although the number of industrial accident applications and approval rates were presented as criteria for job selection, they were applied inconsistently, reducing reliability. For example, a certain job type was included in the application target because it had only one application but a 100% approval rate. There are also job types included in the amendment without clear explanation despite being classified as excluded in the research reports, indicating unclear grounds. Moreover, the job selection criteria differ among the three research reports, and job types selected in past reports remain included even if they fall short of the new criteria.

In particular, the notification amendment is seriously problematic because it cannot reflect differences in labor intensity. Even within the same job type, labor intensity varies by workplace, which can affect the occurrence of musculoskeletal disorders, and differences in labor intensity exist between job types, but these are not acknowledged. For example, even when producing the same product, the labor intensity of workers at Factory A performing manual tasks and workers at Factory B equipped with automated facilities is completely different. In the case of rotator cuff tears in the shoulder area, the average employment period of approved industrial accident claimants is 9 years for liquor and beverage delivery workers, about 24.1 years for tire manufacturing workers, 29.1 years for shipbuilding workers, and 29.9 years for automobile manufacturing workers, showing a difference of more than threefold, indicating differences in labor intensity. However, the notification amendment uniformly sets the period at 10 years. Differences in labor intensity between job types are being ignored.

The basis for setting the employment period at "10 years" is also unscientific. For cervical disc herniation (neck disc), the principle of presumption is applied if the worker has been employed for more than 10 years, based on the average employment period of industrial accident applicants being 10 years. Applying the principle of presumption based on average employment periods for a representative degenerative disease that frequently occurs in people in their 40s and 50s is an unacceptable argument.

The fundamental purpose of pushing for the notification amendment is to improve the speed of industrial accident processing. If so, the solution for faster processing should break away from the fixed idea of applying the principle of presumption by job type. Applying the principle of presumption by job type ignores differences in labor intensity and leads to unreasonable results where industrial accidents are recognized if the job type is the same and a certain period is worked, regardless of how much the company improves working conditions. As a result, companies may take a passive attitude toward improving work conditions, and workers may have to work under poor conditions. The notification amendment should not cause distrust in government policy or pour cold water on companies striving to improve working conditions. Rather than the forced attempt to apply the principle of presumption by job type, it is desirable to proceed by reviewing various methods such as expanding accident investigation personnel and utilizing private experts including ergonomics engineers and technical experts.

Dongpil Woo, Professor, Department of Human System Design Engineering, Dong-Eui University

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