hankyoreh

By Jeon Jong-hwi, staff reporter

Hyundai Steel and Daewoo Engineering and Construction (E&C) have garnered the disgraceful reputation as being the South Korean corporations with the most fatal accidents, after both having ten employees die in industrial accidents in 2013.

The Joint Campaign to prevent industrial fatalities, participated in by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, held a press conference at the Cheonggye Plaza in Seoul on July 9 at which it announced that the two companies had been chosen as the “most murderous corporations of 2014.”

A string of industrial accidents at Hyundai Steel led workers to dub it as “the factory of death.” In May 2013, five workers at a subcontractor were asphyxiated in an argon gas leak. Another five workers died during various accidents on the job that involved suffocating, falling, being caught in ropes, and being crushed. While four of the deceased were originally employees of Hyundai E&C and Hyundai Green Power, they were included in the figure for Hyundai Steel because that is where they were working when the accident occurred, campaign organizers said.

In protest of the deaths, subcontract workers at Hyundai Steel factories in Dangjin and Suncheon, South Chungcheong Province will be going on strike on the morning of July 10. The workers are planning to hold a demonstration in front of Hyundai Motor headquarters in the Yangjae neighborhood of Seoul. They will hold a sit-in to ask the company to “guarantee the right to work without dying,” to guarantee the right to rest, and to resolve employment insecurity.

Daewoo E&C also returned to the number one spot, which it previously held in 2011. Ten workers at the company died in accidents, including falling and being struck by falling objects, during apartment and road construction.

Ranking third was Daelim E&C, the prime contractor in an accident at the Yeosu Industrial Complex in Mar. 2013, where six people died in an explosion. In fourth place were Cheonho, Jungheung, and Shinhan construction companies, which were the prime contractors in an accident in which seven workers drowned while working on water pipes on the Noryangjin segment of Olympic Expressway in Seoul in July 2013.

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