hankyoreh

Photos of Park Seon-bin, who lost her life in an industrial accident at SPL’s factory in Pyeongtaek on Oct. 15, 2022, fill a corner of the shelf where Park’s urn is kept. (Jang Hyeon-eun/The Hankyoreh)

Her name was Park Seon-bin. One year after her passing, the Hankyoreh is finally printing her name. Until now, she remained anonymous on our pages, referred to only in pseudonyms or as the 23-year-old worker who died after getting caught in a sauce mixing machine at an SPL factory located in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province.

The young woman’s mother decided to make her daughter’s name public “so people do not forget Seon-bin’s death, and to do something to ensure that things like this stop happening.”

Sunday, Oct. 15, marked the one-year anniversary of Seon-bin’s death on the factory floor.

Two days before the anniversary of the devastating disaster at the SPC-affiliated SPL factory that shocked the nation, Seon-bin’s mother, a 52-year-old surnamed Jeon, met with the Hankyoreh at a coffee shop in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province.

Jeon bowed her head as she held a letter that she wrote to her daughter in front of her and read from it.

“I haven’t found any answers, and the pain and sadness that I feel from knowing that I can’t do anything only makes it feel worse.”

Jeon’s words capture the frustration she felt in the face of recurring industrial accidents that leave workers dead after learning that yet another worker died at an SPC-affiliated factory in August.

Whenever Jeon hears about a worker dying on the job, she keeps going back to that fateful day: Oct. 15, 2022, 6:18 am.

Seon-bin was mixing wasabi sauce during her 12-hour, 8-pm-to-8-am graveyard shift when her right arm was caught in the rotating shaft of the mixing machine and its blade. It took about an hour for her mother to learn what had happened.

“I was told that she’d been in a work-related accident and that I needed to go to the factory. The 15-minute drive from my home to the factory felt never-ending. The police told me that the scene was ‘too gruesome,’ and that I shouldn’t go inside. I don’t know why I took their word for granted. I so, so regret not going inside,” Jeon said.

Last year, on the day Seon-bin was cremated (Oct. 20, 2022), Jeon told the Hankyoreh that all she wanted from SPC was for them to make sure that her daughter would be the last victim of any such industrial accidents.

Hur Young-in, the chairperson of SPC Group, apologized to the public the next day and pledged to invest 100 billion won in strengthening safety management, promising to prevent a repeat of the terrible accident. But Jeon’s one wish for there to be no more deaths soon was proven to be no more than wishful thinking.

Seon-bin’s mother stands before her daughter’s urn at a memorial park in Cheonan on Oct. 13. (Jang Hyeon-eun/The Hankyoreh)

On Aug. 8, not even a year after Seon-bin’s death, a worker in her 50s lost her life when she was caught between a dough bowl lift and a dough divider/rounder at the bakery production line for Shany, also part of the SPC Group, in Seongnam.

Jeon was reminded of the industrial accident that took Seon-bin’s life.

“If anything had changed after Seon-bin’s accident, this wouldn’t have happened,” she said. “It’s all been lip service; nothing has changed a bit.”

The day that the worker died on the Shany production floor, the alarm on the bowl lift machine’s alarm that normally goes off whenever the lift goes up or down, did not activate. The machines were also not equipped with safety sensors that would detect jams and automatically stop.

The mixing machine that Seon-bin was pulled into also had no protective device that could detect a person was being pulled into the machine and automatically shut off. Though 10 months had passed between them, the two deaths bore a striking resemblance.

Jeon said that her daughter’s death and the deadly industrial accidents that have continued to occur in the year since have made her realize that companies “lack basic safety systems.”

The reason for this is that “companies think of their employees as machines, not people,” in Jeon’s eyes.

According to the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency’s statement on its investigation of the accident, obtained by the Hankyoreh through the office of Democratic Party lawmaker Lee Soo-jin, in a risk assessment, the machine which Seon-bin was sucked into was assessed as posing “negligible risk” despite the risk of a person being caught in it being detected, and no safety measures were taken.

No risk assessments were made for Seon-bin’s job of mixing sauces, and there were also no work safety standards in place.

The company did not identify night shift work as a risk factor, even though workers on night shifts are prone to fatigue and losing concentration. The company overlooked a number of hazards that could not have been missed from a human safety perspective. At the SPL production line, there have been 12 accidents involving workers getting caught in machines in the last three years.

Jeon believes that the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, which holds management responsible for establishing a safety and health management system, has proven powerless. In August, prosecutors indicted SPL CEO Kang Dong-seok on charges including violating the act, but did not indict the group’s chairperson, Hur.

Seon-bin’s mother speaks to the Hankyoreh at a coffee shop in Cheonan. Jeon says she “still hasn’t wrapped her head around” her daughter’s death and that she “still can’t believe it happened.” (Jang Hyeon-eun/The Hankyoreh)

On Sept. 18, the woman’s surviving family made an appeal against the prosecution service for not prosecuting Hur. “We cannot improve the corporate culture and eradicate serious industrial accidents unless we punish Hur, the chairperson of SPC, a corporate group that actually controls, operates and manages workplaces, for violating the Serious Accidents Punishment Act,” they wrote in their complaint.

“I do feel as if people who are powerless, such as ourselves, can’t do much, but even if we don’t win, we have to do what we can,” said Jeon.

After the accident, Seon-bin’s family closed the printing shop they had been running for 20 years and moved out of their longtime home. Jeon says that she’s simply “getting through each day with six antidepressants.”

Jeon spent days replaying memories and blaming herself following the accident. The grieving mother recalled, one painful memory after another, how she had encouraged Seon-bin to work at SPL, since her daughter loved baking, how she whole-heartedly believed in the merit of a major company and celebrated Seon-bin getting the job, and how she dismissed how Seon-bin would come home from her shift with small cuts all over her elbows, believing her daughter when she said she was OK.

The family now treasures Seon-bin’s old baking books and albums of her favorite K-pop group, Winner

The only thing that has helped them deal with the pain is the outrage and support from the public.

“I’m grateful to have at least one thing to lean on for support. I still hope what happened to Seon-bin doesn’t happen to anyone else. Now that I’ve been through it, I know how difficult and painful it must have been for other families to go through it alone.”

In March 2022, Jeon’s daughter changed her name from Hye-yeon to Seon-bin. She’d told her mom that she’d grown to love the name Seon-bin, and that it kept catching her eye.

Seon-bin only had seven months with her new name before she passed away.

“I know it will be hard for people to remember her with the same pain I feel as her mother,” Jeon said, “but I still want people to call her by her name and not forget her.”

By Jang Hyeon-eun, staff reporter

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