Following the full revision of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 2019 and the enactment of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act in 2021, the government has recently maintained a hard-line stance on field guidance and oversight, including announcing a plan to add 2,000 labor inspectors.
There is social consensus on the need to expand safety inspections at industrial sites, but many small and subcontracting firms with limited administrative capacity say the practical burden is heavy.
An official at a small construction company said, "To avoid legal penalties, large prime contractors are passing fragmented administrative work—safety, budgeting, personnel—directly on to subcontractors," adding, "Small subcontractors without dedicated teams are bearing the brunt of vast demands handed down by prime-contractor managers in a 'responsibility-evading' manner."
The official noted, "The more the law is tightened, the more the prime contractor's safety management responsibility is being replaced by the subcontractor's 'documentary evidence,'" adding, "Within fixed timelines and budgets, subcontractors are shouldering the tangible and intangible expense burdens of responding to oversight, and on-site safety capacity is deteriorating rapidly."
◇ The fatal industrial accident rate is 1.6 times the OECD average… Government signals "high-intensity inspections" for 140,000 business sites
In Jan., the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL) announced an "innovation plan for labor inspection administration," saying it would sharply increase the number of business sites subject to inspection from the current 50,000 to 140,000 by 2027. As a result, the number of on-site inspections is expected to rise about 2.8 times.
The core of the personnel expansion plan is adding a total of 2,000 labor inspectors. In particular, the share of inspectors in industrial safety will be raised to around 50% of the total by 2028. In the labor sector, the focus of inspections will include not only unpaid wages and long working hours, but also cases of evading the Labor Standards Act, such as so-called "fake 3.3 contracts."
Measures to improve the qualitative level of inspections will proceed in parallel. The government will fully introduce continuous inspections based on anonymous reports and substantive surveys of actual working conditions, and will impose immediate sanctions without corrective orders on habitual or malicious violators and employers who violate safety and health measures obligations.
A legal professional said, "This policy is likely to be pushed at an unprecedented level in both quantitative and qualitative terms," adding, "Since the operating method and nature of labor inspections themselves are shifting, this will directly affect corporations' overall HR and labor management."
The government pulled out this tough regulatory card because it judged that Korea's industrial accident indicators remain too high compared with major advanced economies to leave unaddressed.
According to International Labor Organization statistics, in 2023 Korea's overall fatal industrial accident rate per 10,000 workers was 0.39. That is 1.6 times the average of 0.24 for the top 10 OECD countries.
Korea's fatal accident rate in construction is higher, at 1.59. That is the highest among the top 10 OECD countries. The average for the same group is 0.78.
◇ 1,220 safety regulation provisions… But the accident rate at business sites with fewer than 300 employees "rebounds"
The problem is that these successive regulations are leading to overlapping rules and double penalties rather than substantive prevention.
According to the Korea Association of Legislation Studies, the government currently regulates corporations with a total of 1,220 provisions related to industrial safety. In addition to the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, numerous related statutes are intertwined, creating significant confusion on the ground over which standards to prioritize.
A railway construction site is one example. Even if an employer fully complies with the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL)'s safety standards, it will be hard to avoid punishment if an accident occurs without faithfully implementing the Railway Safety Act's requirement to assign a "work supervisor." In such cases, the violation of another law can be deemed a "violation of the duty to secure safety and health" under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act and become grounds for criminal penalties.
This structure traps corporations in "paperwork to avoid penalties" rather than "substantive accident prevention."
The quantitative expansion of regulation has not translated into improved indicators. According to Statistics Korea, the accident rate at business sites with fewer than 300 employees fell until the mid-2010s, then recently rebounded in a U-shaped curve.
Indicators from the past five years, when regulations were greatly strengthened, are even more negative. The accident rate at business sites with fewer than 300 employees, which had fallen to 0.55% in 2017, instead rose through the full revision of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 2019 and the enactment of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act in 2021, reaching 0.70% as of 2024.
By business site size, vulnerabilities were pronounced at small business sites with fewer than 50 employees. A total of 80.9% of fatal accidents occurred at business sites with fewer than 50 employees, with the share for very small business sites with fewer than five employees the highest at 38.4%.
◇ Small business sites with low regulatory compliance… "Need administration that helps prevention capacity rather than crackdowns"
Experts say it is urgent to move away from tightening corporations with dense regulations and shift to a "self-regulatory system" in which on-site actors manage risks themselves according to site characteristics.
The United Kingdom is cited as a success story. In 1974, the U.K. adopted goal-oriented regulation that presents only final goals instead of detailed guidelines. Whereas existing rules focused on checklist compliance such as "wear hard hats, install 1-meter railings," the new system imposed a comprehensive duty to "take all reasonably practicable measures to prevent accidents."
Bae Gwanpyo, a professor at Chungnam National University's Graduate School of Public Policy, said, "Self-regulation does not mean abandoning industry; it means the law sets the basic obligations while on-site actors lead everyday safety management," proposing, "A gradual transition is needed, such as having workers participate directly to create practice-centered safety standards."
Bae also advised integrating today's fragmented statutes into a single performance-centered law to remove regulatory inefficiencies, and establishing an independent, safety-specialized administrative body like the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the U.K. to enhance policy expertise and enforcement.
For the potential management gap at small business sites when self-regulation is introduced, he suggested the role of "intermediate organizations" as an alternative. He said, "It is not easy for individual small and medium-sized enterprises to build a self-regulatory system," adding, "Intermediate organizations such as industry associations or regional councils must be in place to jointly establish and disseminate standard risk management criteria."
An official at the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL) said, "We fully recognize that small business sites feel a significant burden in the process of complying with strengthened safety standards," adding, "We plan to continuously expand multifaceted support measures, including tailored consulting."