South Korea’s new Serious Accidents Punishment Act driving Construction Safety
Recently in South Korea, the need for safety management across industrial sites has increased significantly with the enforcement of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA).
As fatal accidents on industrial sites have become a major social issue, the National Assembly has passed SAPA which took effect from January 27 2022.
Although SAPA is not much different from the established Occupational Safety and Health Act as both Acts are aimed at preventing serious accidents while ensuring the safety of workers, it has expanded the range of those applicable disasters to a great extent with much enhanced punishment for violating the law.
If the cause of a serious accident is found to be negligence in safety management, SAPA imposes criminal liability against business owners or responsible managing officers who fail to ensure the safety of their business operations. Furthermore, the Act imposes monetary penalty to businesses or institutions who fail their supervisory duties and punitive damages of up to five times the actual damages.
According to the statistics from the Ministry of Employment and Labor, more than half of the deaths from accidents in 2021 were from the construction industry, and the number of injured accounted for more than 25% of the total. In addition, the deaths in the construction industry contribute to nearly half of the 446 fatalities in the first half of 2022.
With a surge in market demand to comply with SAPA, various solutions and products have been released to take a proactive approach to prevent accidents and casualties at construction sites. LG U+ introduced “Smart Safety Solution,” a Bluetooth and machine learning-based smart safety platform.
As LG U+ has been consistently investing in developing innovative technologies and fostering specialists, the company released an integrated safety solution that leverages monitoring systems including U+ smart safety equipment such as U+ Smart Safety Harness, Helmet, Beacon and Hook with IoT sensor technology to secure a safe working environment for workers and remove safety hazards at industrial sites.
GSIL, a smart safety company, launched a smart safety integrated platform “BE-IT” with 4th industrial technologies such as IoT, ICT, and AI, providing a solution to manage safety issues and productivity through integrated safety data in the field. Currently, system application and collaboration plans for GSIL’s solution are being discussed with Kuwait’s F1 Stadium, South Saad Al Abdullah Smart City, LA Metro Construction in the U.S., Long Son in Vietnam and etc…
The K-ConSafety Expo, which will be held at KINTEX in Goyang from October 19 to 21, is a great opportunity to meet the latest products and solutions of smart construction safety companies to manage on-site safety and prevent serious accidents. In addition to LG U+ and GSIL, POSCO ICT will participate as an official sponsor.
