Delivery Worker Loses Leg After Stepping on Glass Shards While Struggling to Meet Quota...

Only disinfecting wounds led to severe osteoarthritis worsened by diabetes
Working in a one-person sales office handling over 100 parcels daily

The Delivery Workers' Union held the "2022 National Delivery Workers' Rally" on February 21 at Cheonggye Plaza in Seoul, urging CJ Logistics to fulfill its social agreement and accept dialogue. Photo by Honam Moon munonam@

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyunjung] A delivery worker who stepped on glass during a delivery but continued working to meet his quota ended up having his leg amputated.

According to a KBS report on the 29th, Mr. A, a delivery worker in his 50s, stepped on glass during a delivery in June, causing glass shards to embed in his foot. Due to a busy schedule requiring him to meet a daily quota, Mr. A was unable to receive proper treatment and only disinfected the wound before continuing to work. However, after two weeks, when the wound had not healed, he reluctantly visited a hospital and received devastating news. The wound combined with diabetes had spread into severe osteoarthritis, requiring leg amputation. Mr. A ultimately underwent four surgeries to amputate below the shin and lost his leg. The doctor who treated Mr. A expressed regret, saying, "If he had come a little earlier, when there was only inflammation in one toe, it wouldn’t have spread."

The reason Mr. A could not easily visit a hospital was that he worked as a one-person business assigned over 100 delivery packages daily. He had a consignment contract with a branch acting as the cargo manager for the delivery headquarters and worked as both an office employee and the boss. To take a break, he would have to entrust his work to a temporary driver, which costs tens of thousands of won per day. He also had to bear full responsibility for any delivery delays. When the pain worsened, Mr. A asked the branch for help, but aside from calling a temporary driver, there was no other option.

Having worked in delivery for nearly a year, Mr. A can no longer continue due to the leg amputation and is currently receiving treatment for complications and depression.

As delivery workers continued to suffer from poor working conditions and deaths from overwork, a social agreement to prevent overwork among delivery workers was reached in June last year. The main points of the agreement were to limit delivery workers’ working hours to a maximum of 60 hours per week and to assign separate sorting personnel to handle parcel sorting, which had been identified as a cause of overwork. This agreement was fully implemented starting January this year. According to a survey conducted by the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute last year observing 642 delivery workers, they worked an average of over 70 hours per week.

However, even more than a year after the social agreement, overwork among delivery workers persists, and deaths from overwork continue. In June, a delivery worker collapsed at home while preparing to go to work around 5:30 a.m., and the Delivery Workers’ Overwork Death Countermeasures Committee under the National Delivery Solidarity Union (Delivery Union) classified this as a death from overwork. The committee stated, "The deceased was relatively young at 48 years old and reportedly had no underlying health conditions," and added, "Although it has been a year since the social agreement to prevent overwork was made, the deceased had to endure long working hours of 12 to 13 hours a day."

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