Yoon urges Assembly to delay application of workplace safety act

President Yoon Suk Yeol speaks during a Cabinet meeting held in his office in Seoul on Tuesday. (Yonhap)

President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday urged the National Assembly to pass a revision bill aimed at deferring the enforcement of a workplace safety act that would hold executives of a company criminally liable for a deadly incident at work.

Yoon stressed that time is running out for the National Assembly to delay the implementation of the controversial Serious Disasters Punishments Act. The revision bill seeks to defer the implementation of the act by two years until 2026 for businesses with 49 employees or less. The act would otherwise go into effect starting on Jan. 27.

The act has already been effective on companies with 50 employees or more since January 2022.

A plenary session scheduled for Jan. 25 would be the last chance for the National Assembly to pass the revision bill, which was proposed by the ruling conservative People Power Party in September. The conservative party has consulted with the government to agree on the timely passage of the bill before the date when the act would be enforced.

"Given the reality that the small and medium-sized enterprises are experiencing, they need more time (to brace for the change in legislation)," Yoon said during a Cabinet meeting held in his office in Seoul on Tuesday.

"I can't agree more that the safety of workers is important, but punishing (employers for deadly incidents at work) is not a cure-all. Any punishment must be based on the constitutional principle of 'nulla poena sine culpa.'" "Nulla poena sine culpa" is Latin for "no punishment without fault."

Yoon also touted the deferral as "the business circle's final request."

The Korea Federation of SMEs, a lobby group, estimated last year that some 830,000 companies will be affected by the new legislation. Also, 16.5 percent of some 900 companies responded in the lobby group's own poll that they would consider shutting down or scaling down their business operations if the law was implemented.

"SMEs will find it harder to survive if we put the burden on them, and the shutdown (of these businesses) will affect the lives of the workers and ordinary people," Yoon said.

A poll by Gallup Korea in December, however, showed that those in favor of the deferral amounted to only 28 percent of some 1,000 respondents, while 68 percent responded that the rule should be effective starting in late January.

The bill is among many others sitting dormant in the South Korean parliament, whose term is set to expire in May in the wake of the general election in April.

Yoon also raised the issues of other pending bills, including a bill to relocate the state-run Korea Development Bank's headquarters to Busan to rebalance national growth, and a bill to remove the obligation on a homeowner not to rent out a newly-built house for up to five years if the house they bought had a price ceiling in place.

Moreover, Yoon ordered the Finance Ministry to overhaul all 91 types of financial obligations on consumers other than taxes to see if there is room for reducing the financial burdens of ordinary people.

Concerning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's show of hostility toward South Korea, Yoon said the matter of the North Korean regime and its people, including North Korean defectors to South Korea, must be dealt with separately.

Stressing that over 33,000 North Korean defectors are South Korean citizens according to the Constitution and that they deserve to enjoy freedom and prosperity, Yoon ordered the Unification Ministry to initiate work to establish North Korean Defectors' Day, without providing further details.

"What poses a threat to South Korea is the North Korean regime, not the North Korean people," Yoon said. "We must warmheartedly embrace the North Korean people."