임현교  함승언  박건영  이용희

Vol. 37,  No. 3, pp. 52-59, Jun.  2022
10.14346/JKOSOS.2022.37.3.52

accident near miss automobile industry safety culture client subcontractor

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Conventionally, all the unsafe acts by human beings in relation to industrial accidents have been regarded as unintentional human errors. Exceptionally, however, in the cases with fatalities, seriously injured workers, and/or losses that evoked social issues, attention was paid to violating related laws and regulations for finding out some people to be prosecuted and given judicial punishments. As Heinrich stated, injury or loss in an accident is quite a random variable, so it can be unfair to utilize it as a criterion for prosecution or punishment. The present study was conducted to comprehend how categorizing intentional violations in unsafe acts might disrupt conventional conclusions about the industrial accident process. It was also intended to seek out the right direction for countermeasures by examining unsafe acts comprehensively rather than limiting the analysis to human errors only. In an analysis of 150 industrial accident cases that caused fatalities and featured relatively clear accident scenarios, the results showed that only 36.0% (54 cases) of the workers recognized the situation they confronted as risky, out of which 29.6% (16 cases) thought of the risk as trivial. In addition, even when the risks were recognized, most workers attempted to solve the hazardous situations in ways that violated rules or regulations. If analyzed with a focus on human errors, accidents can be attributed to personal deviations. However, if considered with an emphasis on safety rules or regulations, the focus will naturally move to the question of whether the workers intentionally violated them or not. As a consequence, failure of managerial efforts may be highlighted. Therefore, it was concluded that management should consider unsafe acts comprehensively, with violations included in principle, during accident investigations and the development of countermeasures to prevent future accidents.