We Should Have Concerns about Risk Transfer

The recent fatality rate per 10,000workers due to industrial accidents in Korea has gradually decreasing (2007 1⁄4 1.92, 2008 1⁄4 1.80, 2009 1⁄4 1.57, 2010 1⁄4 1.55, 2011 1⁄4 1.48, 2012 1⁄4 1.40). Also, among the total occupational injuries and illness, the proportion of those in employees who belong to a workplace with over 300 employees has diminished since 2004 (2004 1⁄4 14.9%, 2005 1⁄4 12.6%, 2006 1⁄4 10.1%, 2007 1⁄4 8.5%, 2008 1⁄4 7.4%, 2009 1⁄4 6.6%, 2010 1⁄4 5.8%, 20111⁄45.5%, 20121⁄4 5.7%). Based on these statistics, the Koreanoccupational safety and health index seems to have improved, and in particular, the rate of industrial accidents among conglomerates and related fatalities seems to have reduced. Despite this figure, serious industrial accidents still occur in the high risk workplaces. For example, last January, one worker died and four workers were injured by exposure to hydrogen fluoride during maintenance activities in a semiconductor manufacturing company, and last March, six workers died and 11 workers were wounded by a silo explosion during turnaround maintenance work in a petrochemical factory. The major similarity between these recent serious industrial accidents is that they appeared to have occurred in conglomerates. However, in fact, the accidents occurred in subcontracting factories and the casualties were also subcontractors. What do these accidents mean for safety in the workplace? Historically, the national economic development plan in Korea was promoted based on the importance of the heavy chemical industry during the mid 1970s, but from the late 1980s, the focus of the national economic development plan shifted towards the shipbuilding and the steel industries. In view of this change, indirect hiring, including in-house subcontracting, emerged, and expanded in the manufacturing industry during the 1990s, and then even in the service industry. In other words, types of occupations in the service industry such as cleaning, security, and cuisine have been outsourced as labor services and, since the early 2000s, the use of subcontracting for financial advantage has increased in business and the IT industries. In Korea, the increases in in-house subcontracting results in the risk transfer phenomenon where subcontracting employees have been more subject to high-level risk activities than regular workers in the same workplace. In other words, most parent companies transfer high-level risk work activities to subcontractors and the subcontractors also transfer such activities to smaller subcontractors.