"Reduce Burden of Dedicated Safety Teams and Budgets for Small Businesses," Korea Employers Federation Recommends to Government

The Korea Employers Federation announced on the 12th that it has requested the Ministry of Employment and Labor to amend the Enforcement Decree of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act.

This is because, despite more than two years since the law's enforcement, there has been no clear effect in reducing industrial accidents, and confusion at the field level persists. In particular, with the law being expanded this year to apply to small workplaces with fewer than 50 employees, there is a high possibility of repeated excessive punishments.

The Federation argued that only the effective provisions specified in the Enforcement Decree should be applied, and the rest should be excluded. Regarding Article 4 of the Enforcement Decree on the establishment and implementation of safety and health management systems, they believed that only items No. 3 (identification and improvement of hazardous risk factors) and No. 7 (listening to workers' opinions) should be applied.

Workers are working at a construction site in Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do.
[Photo by Yonhap News]

They claimed that setting safety and health goals and management policies, and establishing dedicated organizations to oversee or manage related tasks, should not be applied. They also argued that budgeting for safety and health and executing it according to its purpose, as well as assigning responsible managers, should not be applied to small workplaces.

They requested the exclusion of preparing manuals related to work stoppage and other procedures, as well as conducting inspections and reporting on implementation status at least once every six months. Additionally, since investigative agencies and courts may interpret and enforce the law arbitrarily, they asked for the removal of ambiguous phrases, citing examples such as "budget necessary to be allocated" and "to be faithfully performed."

Considering that the phrase "safety and health-related laws" is vague and causes confusion, they proposed specifying it to five laws including the Industrial Safety and Health Act. They also requested to reduce the required education hours for business managers of workplaces where serious industrial accidents have occurred from 20 hours to 12 hours, and to create a new proviso to prevent duplicate announcements of serious industrial accidents publicly disclosed under the Industrial Safety and Health Act.

Ryu Ki-jung, Executive Director of the Korea Employers Federation, stated, "The government should promptly push for amendments starting with the Enforcement Decree to alleviate workplace concerns and reduce the burden on small and micro enterprises."

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