IPARK Hyundai Development Company(294870)(former HDC Hyundai Development Company) is carrying out the demolition work for the Neunggok District 5 housing redevelopment and maintenance project in Goyang, Gyeonggi, where the death of a worker after a bee sting has raised the question of the criminal liability of the person responsible for management under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act.
Legal experts said that an accident is not excluded from a serious industrial accident just because the cause was a natural factor—bees—but the first threshold for punishment is whether the company could reasonably have foreseen the risk of "bees inside a scaffold pipe."
According to the construction industry on the 18th, the accident occurred on the 24th of last month. While installing a facility to prevent dust and falling objects on a scaffold, the worker was stung by bees inside a scaffold pipe and died on the 8th at a hospital while receiving treatment. The company reported the occurrence of a serious accident to the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL) on the day of the death.
◇ Bee stings can be serious industrial accidents too… punishment of management is a separate issue
A serious industrial accident under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act presupposes an industrial accident under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. If the accident occurred in connection with work, whether the cause was a machine or a natural object is not the decisive criterion. Attorney Kim Dong-ju of law firm Daeryook&Aju said, "Whether it constitutes a serious industrial accident and whether the person responsible for management is punished are separate issues at different levels."
At the stage of criminal punishment, the consolidation between the violation of the duty to secure safety and health and the death must also be proven. An attorney at a major law firm said, "Even if it constitutes a serious industrial accident, that does not immediately establish the criminal liability of the person responsible for management. Only when the person responsible for management violates the duty to secure safety and health under Articles 4 and 5 of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act and thereby leads to a serious industrial accident does the person bear criminal liability."
◇ "Bee risks in midsummer are foreseeable"… "bees inside a pipe" requires a separate assessment
The key issue in this case is the "reasonable foreseeability" of bee-sting risks. Kim said, "The level of foreseeability that 'at an outdoor construction site in midsummer, a worker can be stung by bees' can be recognized." By contrast, Kim noted that "there is room for dispute over the ability to perceive the specific risk that 'there are bees inside the site's scaffold pipe.'" The point is that risk assessments target reasonably foreseeable risks, not every imaginable hazard.
An attorney at a major law firm offered a cautious view. The attorney said, "Setting aside specific circumstances, it is difficult to conclude that the employer had specific foreseeability regarding a beehive inside a scaffold pipe based only on a general, abstract awareness that bees may appear at an outdoor construction site in midsummer." The attorney said the site's geographic characteristics, work hours, specific tasks, and the emergence and perceptibility of beehives should be considered together.
◇ Omitting risk assessment alone is not enough… the consolidation between duty violation and death must be proven
Existing rulings have also treated foreseeability and causation as key factors in assessing criminal liability. On Dec. 2024, the 5th single-judge criminal division of the Western Branch of the Daegu District Court acquitted the chief executive and others of the prime contractor who were indicted for violating the Serious Accidents Punishment Act in a case where a worker died after being struck by a hand tool that sprang out of a compression molding machine at an auto parts plant. While the court recognized a violation of the duty to establish a dedicated safety and health organization, it found the accident unusual and difficult to foresee and ruled that it was hard to acknowledge a substantial causal relationship between that duty violation and the death.
Kim said that applying the reasoning structure of this ruling to the current accident means examining in order: ▲ whether the specific risk of bees was perceived or could have been perceived ▲ whether there was a specific and direct duty to address that risk ▲ and whether fulfilling that duty would have prevented the death. Key factors also include whether beehives or swarms had been sighted or reported at or near the site before the accident, and whether the risk assessment reflected biological hazards such as outdoor work in the summer or bees and pests.
IPARK Hyundai Development Company did not specify whether bees had been found before the accident or the contents of the risk assessment, saying only that it "is faithfully cooperating with the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL)'s investigation."