Yongin City Strengthens Inspections of Construction and Manufacturing Sites with High Industrial Accident Risks

Establishment of Comprehensive Industrial Accident Prevention Plan
Active Management of Small-Scale Workplaces

Yongin City in Gyeonggi Province announced on the 21st that it has established a 'Comprehensive Plan for Industrial Accident Prevention' focused on making local industrial sites safe workplaces.

This plan is a follow-up measure to the enactment of the 'Ordinance on Industrial Accident Prevention and Labor Safety and Health Support' last September.

Yongin City's 'Labor Safety Keeper' is inspecting the safety conditions at a construction site.
[Photo by Yongin City]

The plan emphasizes preventing accidents and spreading a safety culture by pre-inspecting industrial accident risk factors at each workplace and guiding improvements according to safety regulations.

The city will particularly focus on managing construction sites (538 cases) and manufacturing sites (282 cases), which accounted for the largest proportions of the 1,923 industrial accidents that occurred locally last year. To this end, the city plans to establish a cooperative system with the Ministry of Employment and Labor, the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, and others to carry out industrial accident prevention support projects and dispatch safety management advisory teams to private workplaces to ensure compliance with safety rules.

Thorough safety inspections will be strengthened in advance for construction sites with high risks of landslides or collapses during excavation or earth-retaining work in late winter or the rainy season.

For small and medium-sized workplaces with fewer than 50 employees, workplace guidance and inspections will be intensified to resolve issues related to securing personnel and improving facilities for accident prevention, and they will be guided to participate in various projects of the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency.

This plan also includes management measures for small-scale workplaces excluded from the scope of the Serious Accident Punishment Act and thus in a safety management blind spot. For these workplaces, industrial accident prevention campaigns will be conducted regularly, and safety culture will be established by promoting industrial safety information through designated 'Safety Guardians' at each dong administrative welfare center.

Meanwhile, since 2021, the city has been operating 'Labor Safety Keepers' to prevent industrial accidents. These Labor Safety Keepers identify and guide improvements of vulnerable factors at industrial sites and have conducted 1,141 inspections of local workplaces, pointing out 2,863 issues, of which 2,591 (90%) have been improved.

A city official said, "Thorough pre-inspection and preparation are the only ways to protect citizens' safety from industrial site accidents," adding, "We hope each site will be vigilant in complying with safety rules and participate in creating safe workplaces."

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