Labor minister visits CJ CheilJedang plant to promote safety design

Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon visited the CJ CheilJedang plant in Busan on Wednesday to inspect workplace safety designs that use color and markings to guide worker movement. The tour focused on how visual optimization helps employees, including older workers and foreigners, recognize hazards quickly.

Kim emphasized that telling workers to be careful is insufficient for ensuring safety. "It is difficult to ensure safety just by telling workers to be careful," he said. "We must move toward a 'safety supported by systems and environment' where dangerous places are instinctively avoided and safe paths are found intuitively."

A company official explained that the facility redesigned its layout to separate pedestrian walkways from forklift routes at intersections and uses distinct floor colors to improve visibility of emergency exits. "We moved away from existing methods that relied on individual attention or control," the official said. "We redesigned the workplace so anyone can intuitively recognize risks and act safely."

The minister noted that such intuitive designs remove communication barriers faced by foreign, temporary and elderly workers. He pledged to provide technical and financial support to ensure these best practices spread to the broader industrial sector.

To facilitate this, the ministry and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency are supporting manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees through a clean workplace project. The program covers between 50 percent and 70 percent of improvement costs, offering up to 100 million won for high-risk manufacturing sectors and up to 30 million won for other manufacturing and service industries. Support is also available for parent companies that bear part of the costs for improving safety designs at subcontractor sites.