KJCKorea
Journal Central

As the scale and frequency of industrial accidents have increased in our society, along with the resultant social issues, the "Serious Accidents Punishment Act" was enacted on January 26, 2021. This legislation is seen as overcoming the limitations of the previous legal system, which placed responsibility for industrial accidents solely on the on-site safety officers and individual accident-prone workers. It now provides a clear legal basis to impose direct responsibility on business operators and managers. Through this act, our society expects to prevent accidents across industrial sites in advance and to facilitate reasonable punishment for liability in case of accidents. However, the "Serious Accidents Punishment Act" has been criticized since its enactment for potentially violating the constitutional principles of clarity and prohibition of excessive regulation. One significant issue raised is the problem of overlapping legislation with the "Occupational Safety and Health Act," which already regulates safety and health obligations. This problem of overlapping legislation has emerged as a critical issue affecting the application of both laws simultaneously, impacting the relationship between different offenses. This paper analyzes various lower court cases regarding the relationship between the "Serious Accidents Punishment Act" and the "Occupational Safety and Health Act" and examines how the Supreme Court has ruled on the relationship between these two laws. In particular, this paper analyzes a key ruling in which the Supreme Court considered the relationship between these two laws as concurrence of offences rather than a substantive concurrence, investigating the court's specific reasoning and exploring the implications derived from this interpretation.

Working hours are the most important working conditions besides wages. The meaning of working hours is to limit the time a worker is under the employer's orders and to guarantee free time outside this limit. However, there are two major problems with working time laws. First, the recent diversification of employment patterns has created situations that cannot be addressed by existing laws related to working hours. Second, there is the problem of long working hours. Long working hours in Korea have long been an international problem, and a policy of shortening working hours has been promoted. So why hasn't the situation improved much? There seems to be a problem not only with the legal system, but also with the way in which the purpose of legally regulating working hours is understood. Accordingly, from the perspective of solving long working hours, the tasks of the current law on working hours are studied and the current status of workers' working hours and time for everyday life is reviewed and summarized. When we think about what a fulfilling or desirable time of everyday life is, we cannot judge whether it is good or bad based solely on the length or shortness of each action time, including working hours. However, it is necessary to build a society that can promote work-life balance, at least depending on the individual's life stage and living environment. For this, it will be essential to take full account of the time spent on family life and then to review the practices and systems related to working methods. A work style that does not allow for daily leisure time due to long working hours and further leads to death from overwork can be said to be a situation that does not correspond to a quality job as advocated by the International Labor Organization (ILO). In order to correct such long working hours, it is necessary to expand the new concept of time for everyday life, which fully takes into account the health and safety aspects of workers.

According to Article 909, Paragraph 2 of our Civil Code, “during marriage,” parents are to jointly exercise parental rights over their minor children. However, in the case of divorce, while Article 873, Article 909, Paragraphs 4 and 5 do not mandate the appointment of a sole custodian or caregiver, they do interpret the possibility of joint custody after divorce. Despite this interpretation, the actual recognition rate of joint custody for divorced parents remains significantly low. Even if joint custody is legally recognized for divorced parents, practical issues arise such as how to exercise joint custody and how it relates to the right of guardianship, due to the lack of explicit regulations addressing these concerns. Moreover, the global trend, especially in Europe, regards joint custody as the norm regardless of marital status, with sole custody being an exception. Recently, to introduce joint custody for divorced parents as a norm, Japan announced a "Draft Proposal for the Revision of Family Law" on January 30, 2024. This paper reviews the interim proposal and the draft proposal leading up to this announcement, providing insights into potential implications for explicitly incorporating joint custody for divorced parents into our Civil Code. The paper suggests specifying the responsibilities of parents of minors clearly in the law, establishing joint custody as the standard both during and after marriage, and clarifying regulations concerning the exercise of parental rights and the guardianship of children under joint custody.