[Market Economy Op-Ed] Serious Reasons to Amend the Serious Accidents Punishment Act

Whenever an article about the Serious Accidents Punishment Act appeared, I always thought it was someone else’s problem. This law provides for the punishment of the responsible manager when an industrial accident causes a death, illness, or injury. Since I do not work at a construction site and no one in my family runs a business, I assumed it had nothing to do with me. Whenever I saw news reports saying there had been an explosion at some worksite or a fatal fall at some factory that made it subject to the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, I felt sorry, as if watching a fire across the river, thinking that managers would end up being punished one after another.

As it turns out, the Serious Accidents Punishment Act was a fire at my own feet. For the past two years, I have unintentionally been serving as both my apartment building’s resident representative and the chair of the residents’ committee. The residents’ representative council is the body that plans and decides on apartment projects large and small, including the operation, management, and repair of a multi-family housing complex. Recently, our apartment complex was set to undergo exterior painting work, and I was told that because the workers would be descending from the rooftop on ropes while painting, any accident would fall under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act. Painting exterior walls is an essential project that every apartment complex periodically carries out, so it could not be canceled, and I was immediately gripped by fear at the thought of what would happen if an accident occurred and it ended up in the newspapers.

Even more surprising was the fact that all of the work performed by the employees in our apartment management office—tree trimming, electrical work, thorough stairwell cleaning, and so on—also falls under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act. There was even a real case in which an apartment employee’s accident led to punishment. In April 2023, an employee at an apartment management office in Dongdaemun-gu climbed a ladder to carry out work to prevent ceiling leaks, fell, and died. The employee had been working without a safety helmet, and the head of the outsourced management company, who had failed to fulfill the duty to secure occupational safety and health, was punished.

In this way, the Serious Accidents Punishment Act has been creeping into my daily life and the daily lives of ordinary citizens. More than half of the Korean people live in multi-family housing. Every apartment complex likely has a residents’ representative council and building representatives. If a problem arises, the apartment management office head may bear primary responsibility, but can the residents’ representative council that hired the office head, or each apartment resident who delegated decision-making and execution to that council, really be said to have no connection to that responsibility? In fact, there is a rule stating that “even when the residents’ representative council subcontracts construction work to a third party, it must fulfill its duty to secure safety and health so that no serious accident occurs.” It is said that violating this rule leads to punishment.

Once I realized that the Serious Accidents Punishment Act makes everyone, including me, a potential target of punishment, the problem became clear. This law is an unrealistic attempt to forcibly legislate the aspiration that “all workers should be safe.” Even before this law, every apartment complex had been doing its best to ensure that management office employees worked in a safe environment. But creating an unrealistic law and increasing penalties cannot eliminate accidents completely. The causes of accidents are simply too diverse. The same would be true at construction sites and other hazardous workplaces across the country.

It is contradictory from the outset to impose criminal liability on the CEO for an accident that occurs during work. A 6th-grade elementary school social studies textbook says that preventing industrial accidents requires efforts by the government, businesses, and workers. That is common sense. But the Serious Accidents Punishment Act places its emphasis solely on punishing business owners as employers. Small and medium-sized enterprises, small workplaces, and apartment management offices that cannot allocate the budget and personnel needed to prepare for this law are left with no real countermeasures and must simply await legal punishment.

In the end, there is a high risk that, regardless of actual safety, only administrative procedures for avoiding liability will remain. From the standpoint of the responsible party, they are already doing their best, but to avoid punishment in the event of an unforeseen accident, the only option is to prove with paperwork how much effort they made for safety. In fact, in the case of our apartment complex, in addition to the painting contract, we signed an additional “technical guidance contract,” and we are preparing to appoint a safety manager for the management office. Of course, the cost of this will be covered through maintenance fees, meaning all residents will bear it. No one truly believes that having an employee in charge of safety or adding a few more documents will make the worksite any safer.

Even though more costs and effort were invested, serious accidents actually increased. The Ministry of Employment and Labor announced that in 2022, the first year the Serious Accidents Punishment Act took effect, there were 874 work-related accidental deaths, an increase of 46 from the previous year. In the very first year of enforcement, when people would presumably have been extra cautious to avoid becoming an example case, the death toll still rose. This is not because someone was a little more careless; it is because accidents cannot be perfectly controlled, no matter how hard people try, and therefore cannot be perfectly controlled by law. From the beginning, the system was created not on the basis of reality, but simply out of the desire that workers be safe. As a result, economic actors have been forced to pay additional administrative costs throughout everyday life and have become prospective targets of punishment under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act.

Ultimately, the Serious Accidents Punishment Act has major side effects in destroying jobs while the practical benefit it is supposed to protect remains unclear. If apartment management office heads begin to be held responsible and punished for employee accidents, apartment complexes may find it difficult to hire them. The heads of small and medium-sized businesses, who are vulnerable to accidents, may shut down their operations after repeated punishment, and jobs may no longer be offered to age groups statistically more likely to be involved in accidents. Furthermore, even the heads of large construction companies cannot reduce accidents to zero, and if they keep going in and out of prison, there may come a time when they give up the construction business altogether. If apartment complexes built by large corporate brands with advanced technology and capital are no longer constructed, that would harm the entire public.

Since the Serious Accidents Punishment Act is set to be applied to all businesses going forward, it would be better to revise the law to reflect reality before it produces even greater side effects. The obligations imposed on employers should be clarified, and the criminal punishment provisions that penalize CEOs also need to be revised to align with reality.

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Original title: [시장경제칼럼] 중대재해처벌을 개정해야 하는 중대한 이유

Author: Eun-kyung Kwak

Date: 2023-07-25

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&idx=25905