"Work-Related Even Below 52 Hours a Week": Supreme Court Broadens Criteria for Recognizing Death from Overwork

Supreme Court Exposes Blind Spot in "Working Hours" Standard for Work-Related Accident Claims

Overturns Lower Court Ruling and Remands Case

Hotel Employee in His 40s Dies After Irregular

Day and Night Shifts in Basement Level 3

Yonhap News Agency

The Supreme Court has issued a ruling that breaks through the blind spot of “working hours,” long regarded as the absolute standard for recognizing work-related accidents. The ruling says that even if a worker’s average weekly working hours fall short of the “52-hour” threshold for recognizing death from overwork, the case should still be broadly recognized as a work-related accident if irregular shift work and hazardous working conditions are combined. The Supreme Court’s position is that it is necessary to examine the “harshness of the worker’s environment” in practical terms, rather than rely mechanically on “numbers.”

According to legal sources on November 11, the Supreme Court’s First Division, with Justice Ma Yongju presiding, overturned a lower court ruling against the plaintiffs and sent the case back to a lower court. The case was an appeal in a lawsuit brought by the family of Mr. A, a deceased hotel boiler-room employee, against the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service, seeking to overturn its decision to deny survivor benefits and funeral expenses.

Born in 1977, Mr. A joined a company in 2012 and worked in the mechanical section of the hotel’s facilities team. His main workplace was the mechanical room on basement level 3. He was responsible for cleaning air-conditioning units and operating and maintaining boilers, and worked while exposed to constant noise of 75 dB, mineral dust, welding fumes, and other hazardous substances. He was frequently injured while carrying out repair work in confined spaces, and also had to perform emotional labor by responding to complaints from customers and employees.

What particularly threatened Mr. A’s health was his irregular rotation between day and night shifts. Although there were originally rules such as “working consecutive day and night shifts followed by three days off,” this pattern broke down in the 12 weeks before his death. He was also subjected to an irregular schedule because advance notice of work schedules was not clearly provided. Ultimately, Mr. A, who had been assigned to a night shift on April 15, 2019, was found collapsed early the next morning. He was taken to a hospital but died of a “non-traumatic intracerebral hemorrhage.”

The central issue in the trial was whether a substantial causal relationship between the disease and the work could be recognized based on shift work and hazardous working conditions, even though the average weekly working hours fell short of the standard for recognizing a work-related accident: “chronic overwork” (an average of 60 hours per week, or 52 hours or more per week with aggravating factors).

The first and second trials had dismissed the family’s claim. The first-instance court presumed that the illness was caused by the deceased’s neglect of personal lifestyle habits, reasoning that there had been no sudden change in working conditions and that the working-hours requirement had not been met. The appellate court also found that working hours had increased by more than 30% in the week before his death, creating a short-term burden, but did not recognize the illness as a work-related accident, citing the fact that his shifts had been scheduled in advance and that rest after night shifts was guaranteed.

The Supreme Court, however, reached a different conclusion. The justices considered that shift work between day and night could itself cause or aggravate vascular diseases. The court ruled, “The deceased’s work involved a shift system, exposure to hazardous working conditions, and high physical demands,” and added, “Even if his average weekly working hours in the 12 weeks before the onset of the illness were less than 52 hours, the relationship between the work and the disease should be considered stronger.” The Supreme Court noted that the deceased, a healthy 41-year-old man with no history of cerebrovascular disease, had developed blood pressure close to the hypertensive range while working at the business, and found that the lower court had erred in its interpretation of the law on substantial causal relationships in work-related accidents, thereby affecting its ruling.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.