Occupational Safety and Health Committee
Occupational Safety and Health Committee
What is the Occupational Safety and Health Committee?
- A statutory safety and health body with equal representation from labor and management
- A practical channel for sharing risk assessment results
- Meeting minutes and follow-up checks show that the system works
Once the committee actually starts working, safety decisions follow a different path. Until then, everything from guard-device budgets to changes in work methods ended at the executive approval line. With a committee in place, revisions to the safety and health management rules, industrial accident prevention plans, and serious accident investigations and recurrence-prevention measures must go through deliberation and resolution by equal numbers of labor and management members. Resolutions bind both the employer and the employees, so neither side can overturn them later at will. What was said and decided on site is now kept as dated records, which is the biggest change practitioners notice.
Whether you must set one up depends on the combination of industry and size, not size alone. Certain industries such as manufacturing are covered at 50 or more regular employees, other industries at 300 or more, and construction by contract value. So two workplaces with the same 100 employees can reach different conclusions depending on industry. Each side may have up to 10 members, in equal numbers; regular meetings are held every quarter, and ad hoc meetings whenever the chair deems one necessary. Another point often missed is that the requirement applies to each workplace, not the legal entity. With two plants, holding one combined meeting at headquarters does not count.
It also helps to tell it apart from bodies with similar names. Under the Act on the Promotion of Workers' Participation and Cooperation, a labor-management council can put safety issues on its agenda but cannot replace the Occupational Safety and Health Committee. The safety and health consultative body for subcontracted worksites is a separate forum where principal contractors and subcontractors coordinate work schedules and the risks of mixed-work operations. Conversely, the duty to hear workers' opinions under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act can be treated as met if the committee deliberated and resolved the matter. In other words, with a well-designed agenda, a single meeting can cover both obligations.
Things usually fall apart in three places. First, the company appoints foremen or team leaders as employee-side members. If the worker representative is not formally appointed or elected by a majority of workers, the committee itself is flawed, and even the safety and health management rules it adopts can be challenged. Second, meetings are never held; written resolutions are simply circulated for signatures. Third, resolutions are passed and then postponed on budget grounds, and the record that reads worst in a post-accident investigation is minutes showing that the company 'knew of the risk and did not act.' Which workplaces must establish a committee, how often it must meet and which matters it must review may change with legal amendments, so check the latest requirements.
Jungmi AhnSkin & Beauty Research and Training Specialist
Kyungtae KimHR Specialist · Organizational Culture and HR Strategy ConsultantKorea’s Occupational Safety and Health Act requires workplaces above a certain size to set up an Occupational Safety and Health Committee made up of equal numbers of employee and employer members, which deliberates and resolves key safety and health matters.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A makes auto parts, with 240 employees and two plants. It had committee rules on paper, but for the past two years a single written resolution stood in for its meetings, and last year two hand-crush injuries occurred on the press line. After receiving a notice of inspection from the regional labor office, the safety and health team rebuilt the committee from scratch, starting with its composition.
- The head of the safety and health team rechecked the industry type and number of regular employees at both plants and confirmed that each plant must have its own committee. They told the Management Support Division, "Bundling them together at headquarters was wrong from the start."
- The General Affairs team dropped its practice of appointing foremen and instead elected five employee members per plant by vote. Turnout was 78% at Plant 1 and 81% at Plant 2, and the election notice and the vote count were kept on file together.
- At the Q1 regular meeting, they put 12 presses with missing or broken photoelectric safety guards on the agenda from the risk assessment results. The Plant 1 assembly foreman’s remark that "two of them have been running for three months with dead sensors" went into the minutes word for word.
- The head of production, serving as an employer-side member, proposed a replacement budget of KRW 48 million (≈ US$35,900) with a completion deadline of the end of September, and the committee passed it. They also made 'Review of implementation of past resolutions' the standing first agenda item at each quarterly meeting.
- A year later, all four quarterly meetings had been held, 15 of 18 resolutions were implemented on schedule, and near-miss reports from the press line rose from 1 to 6 per month while injuries stayed at zero. The inspection raised no committee-related findings.