Serious Accidents Punishment Act: If we care about lives, prevention should come before punishment

Businesses are suffering under the weight of continuing anti-market regulations. In 2020, the government was criticized for ignoring the reality facing businesses through the three major corporate regulatory laws, which seriously threatened management rights. Even so, from the very beginning of 2021, it passed a bad law that treats businesspeople like criminals. That law is the Serious Accidents Punishment Act. It effectively branded managers as “potential criminals.” At a time when the entire economy was being battered by the COVID-19 pandemic and companies in particular were being pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, the government pressed ahead with anti-business policies of a kind virtually unprecedented anywhere in the world.

The Serious Accidents Punishment Act stipulates that if a worker dies in an accident, that is, in the event of an industrial accident, the CEO or the director in charge of safety shall be punished by imprisonment for at least one year or a fine of up to 1 billion won. Despite strong opposition from the business community, this bill passed the plenary session of the National Assembly under political logic. The ruling Democratic Party unilaterally pushed through new provisions mandating blind punishment of business executives.

Severely punishing management cannot be a solution to accidents. The Korea Employers Federation (KEF) criticized the disregard for the business community’s appeals, saying, “We cannot help but feel regret, devastation, and frustration.” Small and medium-sized businesses reacted by saying they “cannot contain their anger.” The absence of any exemption provision even when a person has faithfully fulfilled his or her duties as a prudent manager raises doubts about the true purpose of this law. It invites suspicion that the law is a form of political pressure designed to force businesses to operate in fear and anxiety while watching the reactions of political interest groups. Economic organizations are calling for supplementary legislation, but politicians are ignoring them.

Another problem is that the basis for such harsh punishment is not clear. Article 4 of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act states that businesses must “take measures concerning the establishment and implementation of a safety and health management system, including the personnel and budget necessary for accident prevention.” But it does not clearly present the normative basis for punishment. There is also the problem of assigning responsibility for ensuring safety. Since it is practically impossible for a CEO to manage each individual worksite, there is a serious risk that placing unilateral responsibility on the CEO will only heighten fear and anxiety in business management.

This law was originally demanded by labor groups in response to accidents at public enterprises, including the Kim Yong-gyun case, yet politicians excluded public enterprises from the law’s scope of application. By targeting only private companies for punishment, it suffers from serious problems in both purpose and fairness. In that sense, the law calls to mind China, where the economic structure is being turned into a thoroughly state-controlled economy in which only public enterprises survive while private firms are gradually driven out.

If the goal is to reduce industrial accidents, the law should focus primarily on accident prevention. But this legislation is focused only on severe punishment. In fact, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan provide for penalties under industrial safety laws at levels such as “imprisonment of up to one year,” “custody of up to two years,” and “imprisonment of up to six months,” whereas Korea has set the level of punishment relatively and excessively high. Claiming to consider the pain of victims and bereaved families while advocating only blind punitive severity merely undermines the law’s effectiveness.

Channels of communication between labor and management are the most important factor in creating an accident-free work environment. In particular, a safe working environment must be built by the actors on the ground through smooth role-sharing and contribution between labor and management. Former Minister Kim Dae-hwan, who served as Minister of Employment and Labor under the Roh Moo-hyun administration, once pointed out that the government’s double standard toward companies and labor unions was causing “the politicization of unions” and a deepening of labor-management conflict.

Worker safety should not be treated as a problem belonging only to management. In fact, during strikes by the Hyundai Heavy Industries and IKEA labor unions in 2019 and 2020, aggressive labor actions disrupted legally required safety training and sparked controversy. Given the current state of labor-management relations, marked by hostility and discord rather than negotiation and communication, regulations that punish only management have clear limits in improving safety at worksites.

Accordingly, the expansion of safety infrastructure should focus on prevention in advance. The Federation of Construction Associations of Korea has proposed expanding incentives for companies that invest in safety management, such as facility improvements. It would also be desirable to encourage internal preventive measures by granting exemptions from liability for accidents when companies comply with the safety standards set by law. The government, too, has sought to encourage the fulfillment of social responsibility through various incentives. What is needed, then, is a shift in the policy paradigm from “punishment after the fact” to “prevention beforehand.”

In preventing safety accidents and protecting precious lives, the most important factor is how worksites respond. It was from this perspective that the United Kingdom enacted the Health and Safety at Work Act in 1974. The idea was that, rather than the government dictating how to manage the various risk factors present at industrial sites, there needed to be a major shift toward having those at the worksites themselves identify and implement appropriate methods of risk management. Our society, too, should think less about indiscriminately producing punitive provisions tilted toward the interests of labor groups and more about effective ways to solve the problem. Rather than continued hostility between the business and labor communities, one hopes that supplementary measures can be 마련ed through joint effort to build a better working environment.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: 중대재해법, 인명을 생각한다면 사후처벌 대신 사전예방으로

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2021-01-22

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&idx=23440