Cooking 12 Hours a Day at a Restaurant for 18 Years... Court Recognizes "Death from Overwork"

Worked 57 hours a week and 13 days in a row
"The older one gets, the greater the physical burden can become"

A court recognized a woman in her 70s’ death as a work-related accident after she died before heading to work, having spent 18 years working long hours preparing food at a restaurant.

According to legal sources on November 15, the Seoul Administrative Court’s Seventh Administrative Division, presided over by Judge Kang Woochan, ruled in favor of A, the child of the deceased B, in a lawsuit against the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service seeking to overturn its decision to deny survivor benefits and funeral expenses. The court said, “It is reasonable to find a substantial causal relationship between the deceased’s work and her death.”

Seoul Administrative Court. The Asia Business Daily DB

B spent about 18 years handling food preparation and cooking at a restaurant in Yeoju, Gyeonggi Province. She typically stayed at the restaurant for about 12 hours a day, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. On the day of the incident, B was found unconscious in the bathroom of her home at around 7:50 a.m. while getting ready for work. Paramedics from the 119 emergency service took her to a hospital, but she died at around 8:35 a.m. that same day of cardiac arrest of undetermined cause.

A, a bereaved family member, applied for survivor benefits and funeral expenses, saying that accumulated overwork and stress over a long period had caused B’s death. The service rejected the application in October, saying it was difficult to establish a causal relationship between her work and her death. A challenged the decision and filed a lawsuit.

The court found that the deceased’s working hours clearly exceeded the chronic overwork threshold under the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act and its regulations. The Workplace Disease Determination Committee calculated that she had worked an average of 57 hours and 45 minutes per week during the 12 weeks before her death, exceeding by 5 hours and 45 minutes the 52-hour weekly threshold at which the likelihood of a link between work and illness increases. The committee counted only 30 minutes of the one-hour lunch break claimed by the restaurant as rest time. It found that she could not take an uninterrupted break because she continued cooking as customers placed orders, and that a 10-minute break after 4 p.m. was not consistently provided.

The court also considered the physical strain of consecutive workdays. B worked 13 days in a row before her death, took one day off, and then worked 12 days straight. She repeatedly stood for long periods while preparing ingredients and cooking, without getting enough rest. The court found that continuing such physically demanding work without time to recover placed considerable strain on her cardiovascular system.

The service argued that B’s workload was not excessive because she had worked at the same restaurant for 18 years. The court, however, found that doing the same work for a long time does not reduce the physical strain it causes. It noted, “As people age, their cardiovascular function and ability to recover from fatigue decline. Even the same work that they could previously tolerate may place a greater physical burden on them in old age.”

The court also found that B’s pre-existing conditions, including hypertension, diabetes and hyperlipidemia, were not grounds for denying the work-relatedness of her death. A court-appointed medical expert said that the precise cause of death could not be determined because no autopsy had been performed, but that cardiac arrest resulting from acute myocardial infarction was the most likely cause. The expert also said that her pre-existing conditions had generally been well managed. The court stated, “Given, among other things, that B worked normally until the day before her death, it is difficult to conclude that her pre-existing conditions worsened naturally, independently of her work, and caused her death.”

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