정신건강 측면에서 본 산업안전보건 현황과 법적 과제

There has been an increasing awareness of the importance of occupational safety and health day by day. Since the attention on employees’ mental health has been increasing as well, it is needed to look into the status quo of occupational safety and health legislation from the perspective of employees’ mental health. In the case of ‘Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act’ as an ex post legislation focused on compensation, the Act has several limits in that it not only has a pre-existing limit regarding the difficulty arising from the burden of proof on the cause-and-effect relationship between the mental illness and the work, but also has limits that it can’t cover the process of mental disorder or illness and fails to prevent employee from getting worse due to characteristic not to be detected easily, whereas employees’ mental health problem would become more important as the probability that work-related mental disorder and mental illness will occur is increasing. In the case of the Occupational Safety and Health Act as an ex ante legislation focused on prevention, the Act has a limit that it can not regulate measures to prevent employees from mental disorder problem arisen from work-related stress sufficiently in that it didn't expect a work-related hazard that could lead to employees’ mental disorder at the beginning of its legislation. And in the case of the Labour Standards Act that is related to long time work or bullying etc. as one of psychosocial hazards that have affects on employees’ mental health, it has a limit that the Act itself can not cover all those who work as an employee under the supervision of an employer, and especially the article on harassment or bullying at work has blind spot that can’t be covered. In response to the emerging problems regarding employees’ mental health protection, the reorganization of the Occupational Safety and Health Act is needed from the perspective of the education, medical examination, risk-assessment, occupational and health committee at work, and industrial health doctor. And several issues could be raised as new legal assignments in the rapidly changing social situation: (i) to materialize an employer’s duty to take measures or duty of care according to the type of work, (ii) to present grounds for an argument to impose obligations and responsibilities to those who are not employers but contribute to the occurrence of mental disorder, (iii) to draw up measures to institutionalize the items on occupational safety and health and in the framework of law regulating collective labour relation and to create synergy effects between labor-management communication tools.