Ensuring Workers’ Universal Rights Through a “Comprehensive” Legal Framework (Feb. 2026)

Jin-il Choi, Member, Executive Committee

Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health

Translated by Michelle Jang

2026

In the government’s comprehensive occupational safety plan announced last year, one measure aimed at expanding the right to stop work was the creation of a new “right to demand suspension of work or corrective action.” While broadening workers’ right to work safely and healthily is welcome, the proposed measure also left a bitter taste. When a worker senses danger on the job and asks an employer to fix it, that is nothing more than common sense. Why, then, must such an obvious and reasonable act be spelled out in statutory language? Does it mean that in this country even the most basic rights go unprotected unless they are explicitly written into law? Furthermore, how many workers will actually demand ‘corrective action’ just because a few lines are added to the law? One troubling question led to another.

It is hard to believe that industrial accidents will decline dramatically simply by adding new regulations or inserting additional clauses into existing laws. The government has focused on increasing the scale of inspections and oversight, but enforcement alone cannot bring about the deeper changes that are needed. If industrial accident prevention is to move into a new phase, we must rethink the very framework of occupational safety and health law. How should a renewed legal system define the obligations of employers, the rights of workers, and, beyond that, the responsibilities of the state? This is the moment to confront those questions directly.

Universal rights constrained by prescriptive legal systems

If the core of a new occupational safety and health legal framework lies in the “comprehensive duty of the employer,” then workers’ rights must be guaranteed in a correspondingly universal manner. Few would deny that the right to work safely and healthily is a fundamental human right and universal in nature. But does the current legal system truly operate on that premise? Under the present Occupational Safety and Health Act in South Korea, the only human right explicitly articulated for workers is the right to stop work. Other rights—the right to know, the right to participate, and the right to protection—are not clearly codified as such. Instead, they are merely “inferred” from provisions that define employers’ obligations, such as requirements for safety and health education, the operation of occupational safety and health committees, and the implementation of safety and health measures. Moreover, in practice, employers’ duty to secure safety and health is narrowly applied through command-and-control regulations. As a result, it often falls far short of guaranteeing workers’ substantive rights, remaining confined to situations that are simply “not illegal,” rather than ensuring conditions that are genuinely safe and healthy.

Consider one example. In many workplaces, occupational safety and health committees have been established, formally guaranteeing workers’ participation. Yet when it comes time to deliberate on what concrete measures should be taken to secure safety, the discussion often turns on a single question: legality. Management seeks legal advice from its side and labor does the same. The occupational safety and health committee, in effect, becomes a courtroom. Once debate is confined to whether specific measures are explicitly required under the Occupational Safety and Health Act or its Enforcement Rules, attention is easily diverted from the actual risks and particularities of the workplace—the concrete conditions and distinctive hazards that define each site. Workers neither need to, nor should they, carry statute books and measuring tapes as if they were labor inspectors. The same, of course, applies to inspectors themselves. A different approach can be glimpsed in the Enforcement

Policy Statement of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The UK policy illustrates how regulation can function without being trapped within rigid command-and-control provisions—and how the law might operate to secure workers’ substantive right to safety, rather than merely ensuring formal compliance.

Some health and safety obligations are specific and absolute. Others require action “so far as is reasonably practicable.” …We understand that people managing similar risks in similar industries expect a consistent approach from our inspectors when taking enforcement action. However, consistency is not a simple matter. Every situation is different – by virtue of the industry, workplace, its risks, management systems etc… Any enforcement decision therefore requires the appropriate exercise of individual discretion and professional judgement. … A prohibition notice can be served when an inspector is of the opinion that there is a risk of serious personal injury associated with a particular work activity or process or, if a serious deficiency in measures is identified, to prevent or mitigate the effects of major hazards. There does not need to be a violation of the law.

– Health and Safety Executive Enforcement Policy Statement (2015)

At its core, this approach is not so different from what risk assessment itself is meant to achieve: managing risk to an acceptable level in light of its magnitude and the realities of the workplace. When enforcement operates in this way—grounded in the nature of the risk and the specific conditions on site—risk assessment becomes a practical tool instead of a formality. A shift in this direction in South Korea could finally lead to a system that functions as intended instead of the current risk assessment system which is often criticized for lacking meaningful follow-through and concrete improvement measures.

Universal rights constrained by differential obligations

If transforming workplaces long accustomed to command-and-control style enforcement is one formidable challenge, another lies in the exclusion of workers’ rights through differential obligations. As noted earlier, workers’ legal rights are structurally grounded in employers’ obligations. Yet those obligations are far from equal. Depending on industry, size, and employment type, substantial responsibilities are exempted or reduced.

Article 1 (Purpose) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act states that its aim is to maintain and promote the safety and health of “persons who provide labor.” Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Article 2 (Definitions) limits the term “worker” to those recognized as employees under the Labor Standards Act. By the time one reaches Article 3 (Scope of Application), the law goes on to specify certain businesses and workplaces to which all or part of the Act does not apply.

In other words, while the statute proclaims a broad and inclusive purpose, its definitions and scope narrow the field of protection from the outset.

The employer obligation most broadly exempted concerns safety and health education. Businesses in sectors such as finance and insurance, social welfare services, IT, and professional, scientific, and technical services are entirely exempt. Fourteen other industries, including agriculture and fisheries, are exempt if they employ fewer than 50 workers. Workplaces with fewer than five employees are exempt across all industries.

Although these exemptions are often justified on the grounds that the industries concerned are relatively low-risk, this rationale is open to question. Serious accidents occur frequently in agriculture and fisheries, and scientific and research sectors involve distinctive and sometimes significant hazards. The criteria by which these obligations are waived deserve careful re-examination.

At the same time, simply expanding the scope of formal obligations is not, in itself, the answer. Education is ultimately about realizing workers’ right to know the risks of their workplace. That right cannot be fully secured by mandatory provisions on training alone. The real task is to ensure that workers’ right to know is substantively guaranteed, beyond the mere existence of an educational requirement. Various supplementary measures are possible. Yet a practical and universal solution may lie in ensuring that, in every workplace, risk assessments meaningfully provide safety and health information and firmly embed workers’ participation in the process. Only then can the right to know become a lived reality rather than a nominal promise.

One of the most notable obligations applied differently depending on workplace size is the establishment of a safety and health management system—an obligation directly tied to workers’ right to participate. The duty to form an occupational safety and health committee, which represents the highest level of participation, is set at 50, 100, or 300 or more workers according to the industry.

Discrimination is not limited to size alone. For the construction industry, only projects exceeding 12 billion or 15 billion won are required to form an occupational safety and health committee (~USD$8.1 – 10 million). In addition, regardless of whether it is manufacturing or construction, the participation rights of subcontracted workers are extremely restricted under the primary–subcontractor relationship. Likewise, workers in special employment arrangements—who are effectively under the control and management of the employer—are almost entirely excluded from the safety and health management system. In other words, the promise of participation is highly uneven, leaving many workers—often the most vulnerable—outside the mechanisms that are meant to protect them.

Exclusion from the right to participate arises not only from workplace size but also from how the law defines “frontline workers” in sectors such as public administration and educational services. In schools, positions like special education assistants, science lab technicians, and sports instructors, and in public administration, workers such as water meter readers, visiting nurses, and parking enforcement officers, are all exposed to risks including workplace accidents, violence, emotional labor, and musculoskeletal disorders. Yet the law still narrowly defines only a small subset as “frontline workers,” leaving the rest excluded from the safety and health management system. The problem is compounded by thresholds: the obligation to form an occupational safety and health committee arises only when the number of frontline workers exceeds 100, meaning many at-risk employees remain outside the very structures intended to protect them.

Beyond a legal system that stifles imagination

First, problems that can be addressed immediately should be resolved quickly by expanding the scope of the law’s application. Measures such as abolishing the outdated “frontline worker” classification, expanding the application of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act to workers in special employment, and guaranteeing primary contractor bargaining rights under the amended Labor Union Act are now within reach.

The next step is to address the question: how can the right to participate be guaranteed for all working people? Of course, it is neither feasible nor effective to expand the obligation to establish safety and health management systems indefinitely. Yet it is crucial to recognize the blind spots in a legal framework where rights are restricted if they are not explicitly codified as obligations—and to seek alternatives. What kinds of legal reforms, then, are possible to ensure meaningful participation for every worker?

First, we need to design worker participation systems that can function even in small workplaces. This could include strengthening the safety and health-related authority of employee representatives or, in workplaces with fewer than five employees, requiring the appointment of at least one safety representative. Various international examples can be reviewed to guide these approaches.

Second, the establishment of self-regulating preventive systems that transcend individual workplaces must be recognized as a responsibility of both the central government and local authorities. Even if workers have no opportunity to participate in safety and health management within their own workplace, management systems should be created at the level of corporations, regions, districts, markets, or neighborhoods, with structures that allow worker participation. Achieving this will require not only appropriate employer obligations but also the formal codification of the responsibilities of central and local governments.

Of course, many experiments and time will be needed, but the current legal framework—where obligations are defined only at the workplace level and under-resourced workplaces are exempt—cannot overcome these limitations. If the very purpose of the law is to define duties and penalties to maintain social order, the idea of declaring workers’ rights in the Occupational Safety and Health Act might seem naive. Yet no one can deny that guaranteeing those rights is a responsibility of the state. Realizing them will require more than adjustments to the existing obligation-and-exemption–focused legal system; it calls for the imagination to go beyond a legal structure that treats individual workplaces as the sole unit of regulation.