KILSH’s Newsletter in January 2025

Letter from the Editor

If you order a product online at night, you can receive it the next morning. This delivery system, used by Coupang and other e-commerce companies, has led to the overwork of many delivery and warehouse workers. In order to make this delivery, warehouse workers and delivery workers work at high intensity day and night.

CJ Logistics, South Korea’s largest parcel delivery company, launched a plan to deliver goods to customers seven days a week in 2025. After negotiations with the union, the company came up with a plan for a phased five-day week, but workers still work on holidays and it is difficult for them to refuse to work on holidays.

There are four delivery drivers per shift and sometimes one driver has to cover four delivery areas. Drivers are forced to work long hours to meet their daily delivery quota. The system, which was introduced without a staffing plan, is already causing conflicts in the field over holiday work.

By 2025, workers will have to work through weekends and holidays instead of reducing the number of hours and days they work. We think it is time to fight against the attempt to extend working hours and to guarantee workers’ health at work.

We hope you will continue to take an interest in our newsletter. Please pass it on to others.

If you have any questions, please reply to this email.

Thank you.

In-depth review

The climate crisis: defending workers’ health rights(Apr. 2023)

The climate crisis also affects workers’ health. Representative examples are heat-related diseases such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion. These occur when the human body is exposed to high temperatures and has problems regulating body temperature. Construction workers, mobile workers, agricultural workers, and transportation workers who work outdoors are easily exposed to high temperatures in the summer, and high temperature exposure situations are becoming more frequent with climate change. Exposure to high temperatures not only has health effects due to direct heat illness, but can also increase fatigue and reduce concentration, increasing the risk of accidents or injuries at work. In the future, the indirect effects of exposure to high temperatures should also be further studied.

Read more: https://kilsh.or.kr/?p=36217

KILSH’s studies

Survey on working conditions and health effects in school canteens(2022)

School cafeteria workers are responsible for feeding elementary, middle, and high school students across the country. The high number of servings per worker, the incidence of accidents and musculoskeletal diseases, and the recent cases of lung cancer caused by cooking fumes, a carcinogen, have led to a high demand for improvements in the working environment. Since the labor union has been fighting to improve working conditions for a long time, the cafeteria environment and staffing standards have improved. However, the staffing standards in school cafeterias are higher than those of other public cafeterias, and the labor intensity is still high, so further improvement is urgently needed.

In addition, due to changes in the number of students going back to school after COVID-19, workers’ workloads have changed and additional tasks have been added, increasing labor intensity. As such, we wanted to understand the changes in the working environment and the impacts on workers’ health in school cafeterias after COVID-19.

For workers who must work even if they are sick, the necessary measures are to improve the deployment standards and expand the number of replacement workers. We wanted to examine what solutions could be found in the city of Icheon, Kyeonggi province. Similarly, by investigating the working environment of school cafeterias, which is the cause of diseases and accidents, and the health effects on workers, we aimed to identify the intensity of labor in school cafeterias in Icheon, Kyeonggi province and find ways to work healthily.

Read more: https://kilsh.or.kr/?p=35498

About KILSH(Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health)

KILSH is a public interest civil society group focusing on workers’ health and safety. We are working for healthy working conditions for all workers, and for workers to have greater autonomy in their workplaces. We meet and educate workers and trade unions on how to prevent occupational injuries and describe how to get involved in changing the working environment. 

We have worked on important issues such as musculoskeletal disorders, long working hours, overwork and mental illness. We have continued our work on workers’ health rights at small-sized businesses, female workers’ health, the climate crisis, the right to stop dangerous work and how risk assessment is conducted and used. These issues are described in our monthly magazine on occupational safety and health with different topics every month. Our translation team provides information about our activities in English.

Our webpage: https://kilsh.or.kr/en/