Gwangju Nam-gu Corrects Working Conditions for Environmental Workers

Nam-gu District in Gwangju has significantly increased the number of management personnel and vehicles to reduce the workload of environmental workers who collect household waste and to ensure stable garbage collection.

On the 15th, Nam-gu announced, "A research service on the collection and transportation of household waste was conducted to prevent safety accidents among workers and to improve the quality of cleaning administrative services. The results showed that the working environment of environmental workers was very poor," adding, "To improve this, we have recruited 27 additional personnel and increased the number of cleaning vehicles by 10."

The reason for increasing environmental workers and cleaning vehicles stems from a meeting held in February this year between the five autonomous districts of Gwangju and the Home Cleaning Environment Management Labor Union of each district, where the labor union demanded measures regarding the cleaning vehicle footboards, which violate the Road Traffic Act.

Under current law, the installation of footboards is prohibited due to various safety accidents such as leg amputations.

Accordingly, in March, Nam-gu prioritized the safety protection of environmental workers over work efficiency and removed all footboards from cleaning vehicles within the district.

Although this seemed to resolve the issue temporarily, after the removal of the footboards, environmental workers faced a hidden challenge as their fatigue and workload significantly increased.

To verify this, Nam-gu conducted a research service on household waste collection and transportation starting in May and found that the fatigue level of environmental workers sharply increased after the removal of the cleaning vehicle footboards.

In particular, household waste collection in the district occurs once every 2 to 3 days, and the average daily number of steps per environmental worker increased greatly from about 15,000 steps before the footboard removal to 30,000 to 40,000 steps afterward.

Based on the research results, Nam-gu calculated the appropriate increase in personnel and vehicles to reduce the workload of environmental workers and to enable daily household waste collection, resulting in the addition of 27 environmental workers and 10 cleaning vehicles.

Currently, the number of environmental workers in the district has increased from 110 to 137, and the number of cleaning vehicles has risen from 33 to 43.

A Nam-gu official stated, "Due to the increased workload of environmental workers, daily collection of household waste was not smooth," adding, "With the increased vehicles and personnel, we expect to gradually resolve residents' inconveniences caused by uncollected waste and significantly reduce the possibility of safety accidents."

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