한국 석탄산업과 산업재해, 1945-2015 = The Korean Coal Industry and Industrial Accidents, 1945-2015

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the establishment of the growth foundation for the coal industry after liberation, its growth and decline processes, and to reveal the reality of the industry with the highest incidence of industrial accidents.
Korea’s coal industry began during the process of disposing of confiscated property. Alongside promoting coal production at mining sites under the Korea Coal Corporation (KCC), the Korean government reorganized mines that had been sporadically managed through KCC into large-scale coal mining companies. The catalyst for the Korean coal industry’s development after the 1960s was privatization centered on large-scale coal fields.
Although the 1966 ‘coal briquette shortage crisis’ triggered a shift from coal to oil as the primary energy source, the 1973 oil crisis made increased coal production imperative. Due to these drastic changes in external energy supply conditions, Korea’s coal industry repeatedly increased production until the implementation of industrial rationalization in 1988.
While industrial accidents in the coal industry are trending downward, they remain high compared to the overall industry. In 2002, the number of fatal accidents per 10,000 workers in coal mining was 20.37, 17.87 times higher than the overall industry rate of 1.14. After declining, the rate rose again in 2009 to 8.82 fatalities per 10,000 workers in coal mining, 10.75 times higher than the overall industry rate of 0.82.
As of 2015, South Korea’s accident fatality rate per 10,000 workers is 0.53. In the same year, the figures were 0.04 in the UK, 0.15 in Germany, 0.17 in Japan, and 0.35 in the US. This means Korea’s accident fatality rate per 10,000 workers was 13.3 times higher than the UK’s, 3.5 times higher than Germany’s, 3.1 times higher than Japan’s, and 1.5 times higher than the US’s.
While Korea’s coal industry played a vital role in supplying energy to support the nation’s rapid economic growth, its industrial accident rate was exceptionally high compared not only to other industries but also to other countries. This confirms that Korea’s coal industry was the sector where the gap between workers’ contributions and their compensation was the widest.