The National Pension Service Fund Management Headquarters said it will more actively consider whether "serious industrial accidents occurred" when investing in domestic listed corporations going forward. The Fund Management Headquarters assigns and references ESG (environment, social responsibility, and corporate governance) evaluation scores when investing in domestic stocks, and it will add more deduction factors related to serious industrial accidents, such as "two or more deaths in a year," and expand the deduction ratios.
The National Pension Fund Fund Management Committee held its sixth meeting of the year at Government Complex Seoul on the 24th and discussed a "plan to strengthen stewardship activities for domestic stocks." This is a follow-up measure to the "comprehensive labor safety plan" released in September.
The Fund Management Headquarters decided to improve its ESG evaluation framework. Currently, the only deduction target related to serious industrial accidents is "workplaces with frequent industrial accidents" (business sites where the fatality rate per ten thousand workers is at or above the average for the same size and industry), but going forward it will also deduct points for the following: ▲ occurrence of two or more deaths in a year ▲ occurrence of a serious industrial accident ▲ concealment or non-reporting of industrial accidents. In addition, when a serious accident such as a death occurs, the deduction per incident will be increased from 10% of the industrial safety score allocation to 33%.
Minister Jung Eun-kyeong of the Ministry of Health and Welfare said, "We will continue to monitor and improve the implementation process going forward so that stewardship activities on industrial safety, including serious accidents, can contribute to enhancing corporate value and fund revenue."
Meanwhile, at the meeting that day, the Management Committee also reviewed and approved an amendment to the National Pension Fund management plan to secure an additional budget of about 1.25 trillion won for National Pension benefit payments. With this measure, the total National Pension benefit payment budget for this year was increased from 48.41 trillion won to 49.66 trillion won.