What is the Serious Accidents Punishment Act?
Korea's Serious Accidents Punishment Act (중대재해처벌법, "SAPA") holds business owners and top management personally accountable — including potential criminal liability — when a workplace death or severe injury results from a failure to build and operate a proper safety and health management system. For foreign-invested companies operating in Korea, understanding what actually counts as a covered accident is the first step toward compliance.
What SAPA Is Trying to Do
SAPA does not punish accidents themselves. It punishes the failure of an "operator" (사업주) or "person in charge of management" (경영책임자등) (typically the CEO or its equivalent) to establish and carry out a safety and health management system reasonably designed to prevent the accident.
Who Is Covered: The Five-Employee Threshold
Under Article 3 of the Act, SAPA applies to any "business or workplace" with five or more regular employees. Businesses with fewer than five employees fall outside the Act's criminal provisions entirely. This kind of exception based on the five person headcount is often found in labor regulations in Korea.
It's also worth noting that "business or workplace" is assessed as a single organizational unit — not location by location. A company operating across multiple physical sites, none of which is individually large, may still be treated as one integrated "business or workplace" if those sites are organizationally and operationally unified under common management.
What Counts as a "Serious Industrial Accident"
Article 2(2) of SAPA defines a "serious industrial accident" as an industrial accident under the Occupational Safety and Health Act that results in any of the following:
- One or more deaths
- Two or more workers requiring six or more months of treatment from the same accident
- Three or more workers diagnosed with an occupational disease (such as acute poisoning) from the same harmful factor within one year
A few clarifications from the Ministry of Employment and Labor's accumulated guidance are worth flagging for HR and compliance teams:
"Same accident" requires proximity in place and time. Two workers injured months apart by the same underlying hazard — say, a repetitive-strain injury from handling the same equipment — are not treated as the "same accident" unless the injuries arose from a single incident or a closely connected sequence of events occurring at the same place and time. Shared causation alone is not enough.
Not every workplace death or injury is automatically an "industrial accident." SAPA only applies where the underlying incident already qualifies as an industrial accident under the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
Why This Matters for Foreign-Invested Employers
Because liability attaches to the adequacy of a company's safety and health management system, the practical takeaway is prevention-oriented: identify workplace-specific hazards, document a real (not merely paper) system for managing them, and be able to show ongoing, substantive implementation.
This is the first in an occasional series looking at SAPA compliance topics relevant to foreign-invested companies in Korea. We will explain further in future posts such as who qualifies as the responsible "person in charge of management" and what a safety and health management system needs to include.
This post is provided for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. For guidance specific to your organization, please consult qualified counsel. If your company has questions about SAPA compliance or safety and health management system obligations in Korea, feel free to reach out at sjchun@seoulcounsel.com.
© 2026 SJ Chun. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced, copied, or republished, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from the author.
