Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Many Korean enterprises have been operating an occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) based on Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) 18001 certification standards, which were developed in South Korea.
OBJECTIVE:
This study analyzed health and safety performance among enterprises operating KOSHA 18001.
METHODS:
Accident rates from 2010 to 2017 of 1,541 enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001 and those that did not (N = 2,507,363) were analyzed by industry and size. The differences in the accident reduction rate before and after KOSHA 18001 implementation were analyzed in enterprises that implemented the system.
RESULTS:
Compared to before implementation, the accident reduction rate was greater after KOSHA 18001 was implemented. The year that an enterprise began operating KOSHA 18001 was defined as T. For industry-specific analysis, the accident reduction rate between T and T + 1 was greater than that between T-2 and T-1 increased among both manufacturing (p = 0.020) and other enterprises (p = 0.011). For size-specific analyses, the accident reduction rate between T and T + 1was greater than that between T-2 and T-1 among enterprises with 299 or fewer workers (p = 0.008) and enterprises with 300 or more workers (p = 0.043). However, the accident rates of enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001 and those that did not varied by industry and size.
CONCLUSIONS:
The findings suggest that enterprises that do not utilize an OHSMS should consider doing so to prevent and reduce industrial accidents, and industry- and size-specific features should be considered to boost safety performance through the implementation of OHSMS.
Introduction
Background
Modern society is highly complex with an intricate network of highly advanced technological systems. Although technological advances have offered an array of benefits that enrich people’s lives, their close interactions may also cause fatal outcomes because of simple accidents. Major accidents occur repeatedly in industrial settings, and these accidents inflict substantial damage not only at the site of the accident but also in the surrounding regions, thereby having an adverse impact on the sustainable growth of enterprises and countries [1–4].
Enterprises consider health and safety, along with cost, quality, and innovation, as an utmost priority in management [5, 6]. Health and safety regulations for workers are being strengthened and are an essential component of sustainable business management. Thus, enterprises have undertaken various health and safety activities to lower industrial accidents [7, 8], such as health and safety education for workers, safety certification and inspection of dangerous machinery, chemical substance management, and health check-ups for workers. Nevertheless, a consid-erable number of workers develop work-related illnesses, get injured, or die [1, 10]. Therefore, new approaches to health and safety activities have been developed, including the implementation of an occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS).
Previous health and safety activities primarily fo-cused on addressing individual issues; however, the OHSMS maintains and promotes workers’ health and safety by systematically incorporating individual health and safety activities into the system through enterprise-wide participation from executives to wor-kers [11, 12]. Because the key clienteles of enterprises are also interested in the implementation and operation of the OHSMS, it has become a crucial component of business management [13–16]. Enterprises that adopt the OHSMS must undertake diverse health and safety activities to lower any risks for their workers [11, 12].
The occupational health and safety assessment series (OHSAS) 18001 has been widely used as the standard for establishing the OHSMS in South Korea and abroad. Since 2018, the ISO 45001 replaced the OHSAS 18001. Many studies have investigated the effects of running OHSAS 18001- or ISO 45001-certified OHSMS in enterprises [17–22]. The number of safety regulation violations has been used as an index to assess OHSMS performance [23]. According to previous studies, top management, support activities, workers’ participation, education, training, and communication affect OHSMS outcomes [24–29]. The implementation of the OHSMS is a means to upgrade the poor level of health and safety management to achieve sustainable enterprise management [12, 30]. Continuous audits by external organizations through the operation of the OHSMS improve the company’s safety and health [31].
The OHSMS has been reported to have a positive effect on the company’s safety performance as well as sales growth, profitability, and safety climate [22, 32–37]. Conversely, there is a report that safety and health management systems are not related to safety performance [38].
However, current studies are confined to listed enterprises due to limitations in acquiring relevant data, and most listed enterprises are large corporations [12, 39]. Because small and medium enterprises have also implemented the OHSMS, there is a limitation to generalizing the effects of the OHSMS based on large companies’ data. Moreover, owing to data collection limitations, it is practically difficult to conduct multiple years of follow-up with enterprises that have implemented the OHSMS to accurately analyze their performance; therefore, past studies are based on a specific year or industrial field [29, 39–42].
South Korea has operated KOSHA 18001 certification standard for the OHSMS, which have been applied to companies since 1999 [43]. Furthermore, data on enterprises that run the KOSHA 18001-certified system have been accumulated in KOSHA since then. This study analyzed the health and safety outcomes of enterprises that adopted KOSHA 18001 by size and industry through an eight-year follow-up. Because enterprises adopt the OHSMS to generate sustainable health and safety outcomes [12], this st-udy hypothesized that enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 would have a lower accident rate than those that did not implement KOSHA 18001. Furthermore, this study hypothesized that the accident reduction rate would be greater after the implementation of KOSHA 18001 compared to before the implementation.
Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) 18001 characteristics
The Korean government has been intervening in matters directly related to people’s lives and health to ensure a safe and healthy society. KOSHA, a Korean government agency, developed KOSHA 18001 certification standards for the OHSMS in 1999 [43]. En-terprises voluntarily adopt either the OHSAS 18001 (or ISO 45001) or KOSHA 18001 per their needs. Among 1,373 cases certified by KOSHA 18001 or OHSAS 18001 in 2011, KOSHA 18001 comprised 880 cases (64.1%) and OHSAS 18001 comprised 493 cases (35.9%) [44].
KOSHA 18001, which considers Korea’s industrial environment and is based on on-site operability, consists of six certification standards. There are two types—type A (≥50 workers) and type B (<50 wor-kers)—that apply to all enterprises. Particularly, there are four standards applied to the construction industry: project owners, architectural design firms or supervising firms, general construction firms, and specialized construction firms. The structure and contents of KOSHA 18001 type A are shown in Table 1. As shown in Table 1, KOSHA 18001 consists of requirements of ISO 45001 (and OHSAS 18001) and additional requirements for Korea’s industrial environment and on-site operability [45].
Structure and contents of KOSHA 18001 (Type A)
Structure and contents of KOSHA 18001 (Type A)
To analyze the health and safety performance of enterprises that adopted KOSHA 18001, their perfo-rmance was compared with that of enterprises that have not implemented KOHSA 18001. Accident rate (number of work-related illnesses, injuries, and de-aths divided by number of workers) was used as an index for health and safety performance. KOSHA, a Korean government agency, directly conducts certification audits when enterprises apply for KOSHA 18001 certification. KOSHA data were used to obtain information about enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001. In South Korea, employers are obligated to subscribe to an industrial accident compensation insurance scheme to compensate injured workers from industrial accidents. The data of the scheme were used to obtain information about enterprises that did not implement KOSHA 18001.
Among enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001, the military and enterprises that omitted information about the number of workers were excluded. Therefore, among 1,686 enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 as of 2017, 1,541 were included in this analysis. Tables 2 and 3 show characteristics of enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 per industry and size as of 2017. As the comparison group, 2,507,363 enterprises that did not implement KOSHA 18001 but enrolled in industrial accident compensation insurance (IACI) were analyzed.
Implementation of KOSHA 18001 by industry (as of 2017)
Implementation of KOSHA 18001 by industry (as of 2017)
Implementation of KOSHA 18001 by size (as of 2017)
First, the difference in accident rate between en-terprises that operated KOSHA 18001 and those that did not was analyzed by industry and size using eight years of data from 2010 to 2017. In South Korea, industries are classified into major categories and sub-categories. According to the major classification, industries are classified into manufacturing, construc-tion, mining, electricity/gas/steam/water, transporta-tion/warehouse/communication, agriculture/fishery/forestry, finance/insurance, and other businesses. In this study, industries with 30 or more enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 as of 2017 were further classified into subcategories. Therefore, 13 industry types were classified: machinery manufacturing, chemical product manufacturing, electrical machin-ery manufacturing, metal refining, transportation machinery manufacturing, food manufacturing, ship building/repairing, other manufacturing, water tran-sportation, other transportation/warehouse/comm-unication, construction, electricity/gas/steam/water, and other. Regarding size, enterprises were classi-fied according to the number of workers:≤49, 50–99, 100–299, 300–499, 500–999, 1,000–1,999, and ≥2,000.
The t-test and the Mann-Whitney U test were used to compare accident rates between enterprises that adopted KOSHA 18001 and those that did not. The t-test and the Mann-Whitney U test are methods of verifying that there are significant differences between two independent samples [46]. If the number of samples is sufficient, the t-test of parameter statistics is used [46]. If the number of samples is small, the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test is used [46]. Two independent samples were used in this study: one sample comprised enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001 and the other sample included enterprises that did not. The t-test was used when the number of enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 was 31 or greater, while the Mann-Whitney U test was used when the number of enterprises was 30 or below for both analyses by industry and size.
The accident rate for the comparison group was computed in the following manner. Of the 2,507,363 enterprises enrolled in the IACI, after extracting the enterprises that correspond to the sizes and industries of the enterprises that adopted KOSHA 18001, the average accident rate of the extracted enterprises was used as the accident rate of the comparison group. For instance, the accident rate for enterprise A, a machinery manufacturing enterprise with 49 or less workers that operates KOSHA 18001, was compared with the average accident rate of machinery manufacturing enterprises with 49 or less workers among the 2,507,363 enterprises enrolled in the IACI.
Second, this study followed the procedure des-cribed below to analyze the difference in accident reduction rates before and after KOSHA 18001 imp-lementation. The year that an enterprise began operating KOSHA 18001 (i.e., year that certification was obtained) was defined as T. Then, this study analyzed whether there was a significant difference in accident reduction rates between T-2 and T-1 (years that KOSHA 18001 was not implemented) and between T and T + 1 (years that KOSHA 18001 was operated).
The analysis was performed by industry and size. To perform these analyses, accident rates in T-2, T-1, T, and T + 1 were computed. However, all these data were only available for 81 enterprises. The number of cases was too small to divide the enterprises into the 13 subcategories mentioned previously; therefore, the enterprises were only classified into manufacturing and others for the industry-specific analysis. For size-specific analyses, the enterprises were divided into enterprises with 299 or fewer workers and those with 300 or more workers. In Korea, enterprises with 300 or more workers are generally classified as large corporations [47].
For the enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001, the differences in accident reduction rates before and after implementation were compared using the paired t-test and the Wilcoxon test. The paired t-test and the Wilcoxon test calculate the difference between paired samples (e.g., before and after) [46]. If the number of samples is sufficient, the paired t-test of the parameter statistics is used [46]. If the number of samples is small, the Wilcoxon test of the non-parametric statistics is used [46]. The paired t-test was performed when the number of enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 was 31 or greater, while the Wilcoxon test was performed when the number of enterprises was 30 or below for both analyses by industry and size. Statistical tests were performed using SPSS 18.0; IBM, Armonk, NY, USA. The significance level was set at p < .05.
Table 4 shows the difference in the annual industry-specific accident rates for enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 and those that did not. First, there were significant differences among metal refining enterprises in all eight years. Second, there were significant differences among machinery manufacturing enterprises in five of the eight years. Third, there were significant differences among shipbuilding/repairing enterprises in all years except for 2010. Fourth, there were no significant differences among transportation machinery manufacturing enterprises in all eight years. Fifth, there were significant differences among food manufacturing enterprises in all eight years. Si-xth, there were significant differences among electric machinery manufacturing enterprises in two of the eight years. Seventh, there were significant differences among chemical product manufacturing en-terprises in six of the eight years. Eighth, there were significant differences among other manufacturing enterprises in five of the eight years. Ninth, there were significant differences among construction enterprises in all eight years. Tenth, there were significant differences among electricity/gas/steam/water enterprises in six of the eight years. Eleventh, there were significant differences among water transportation enterprises in all years except for 2016. Twelve, there were significant differences among other transportation enterprises in all eight years. Finally, there were significant differences among other enterprises in all eight years.
Difference in accident rates between enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 and those that did not by year and industry
Difference in accident rates between enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 and those that did not by year and industry
Note. SD = standard deviation. +T-test was performed when the number of enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 was≥31. ++Mann-Whitney U test was performed when the number of enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001≤30. All p-values were one-tailed.
Table 5 shows the difference in the annual size-specific accident rates of enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 and those that did not. First, there were significant differences among enterprises with 49 or fewer workers in all eight years. Second, there were significant differences among enterprises with 50–99 workers in all years except for 2017. Third, there were significant differences among enterprises with 100–299 workers in all years except for 2011. Fourth, there were significant differences among enterprises with 300–499 workers in all years except for 2011. Fifth, there were no significant differences among enterprises with 500–999 workers in all eight years. Sixth, there were significant differences among enterprises with 1,000–1,999 workers in three of the eight years. Finally, there were no significant differences among enterprises with 2,000 or more workers in all eight years.
Difference in accident rates between enterprises that operated KOSHA 18001 and those that did not by year and size
Note. SD = standard deviation. +T-test was performed when the number of enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 was ≥31. ++Mann-Whitney U test was performed when the number of enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 ≤30. All p-values were one-tailed.
Table 6 shows the differences in accident reduction rates before and after KOSHA 18001 implementation. For industry-specific analysis, enterprises were classified into manufacturing and other. The accident reduction rate between T and T + 1 significantly differed from that between T-2 and T-1 among both manufacturing enterprises and other enterprises.
Accident reduction rate before and after KOSHA 18001 implementation by industry and size
Note. SD = standard deviation. +T-test was performed when the number of enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 was ≥31. ++Wilcoxon test was performed when the number of enterprises that operate KOSHA 18001 ≤30. All p-values were one-tailed.
For size-specific analyses, enterprises were classified into enterprises with 299 or fewer workers and enterprises with 300 or more workers. The accident reduction rate between T and T + 1 significantly differed from that between T-2 and T-1 among enterprises with 299 or fewer workers and enterprises with 300 or more workers.
Enterprises prioritize safety practice to foster a safe work environment to help workers achieve their work objectives by meeting their safety needs [48]. The OHSMS can serve as a major signaling device for health and safety performance [49]. Other types of systems, such as quality management system or environmental management system, are operated by enterprises institutionally or for marketing, and implementation of these systems can generate performance benefits [50].
This study analyzed whether health and safety performance, namely accident rates, differ between enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001 and those that did not. Industry- and size-specific analyses were performed based on eight years of data from 2010 to 2017. Among the 13 industries that were analyzed, enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001 in 11 industries showed lower accident rates compared to those that did not implement KOSHA 18001 (all except transportation machinery manufacturing and electric machinery manufacturing); therefore, the hypothesis that enterprises that implement KOSHA 18001 would have a lower accident rate than those that do not was partially supported.
Electric machinery manufacturing enterprises show a considerably lower accident rate compared to enterprises in other industries (see Table 4); therefore, lowering the accident rate further may prove difficult. In contrast, the fact that KOSHA 18001 had no significant impact in transportation machinery manufacturing enterprises, despite their higher basal accident rate compared to other industries, is notable.
In the size-specific analysis, KOSHA 18001 lowered accident rates in enterprises with 49 or fewer, 50–99, 100–299, and 300–499 workers. However, there were no significant differences in accident rates following the KOSHA 18001 implementation in enterprises with 500–999, 1,000–1,999, and ≥2,000 workers. Therefore, the hypothesis that enterprises that implemented KOSHA 18001 would have a lower accident rate than those that did not implement KOSHA 18001 was supported in small and medium enterprises. Previous studies reported that enterprises with a high accident rate are likely to modify their existing safety practice [30], and that the OHSMS lowers work accidents and safety violations [12, 51]. Thus, small and medium enterprises with a relatively high industrial accident rate could benefit from the OHSMS thereby improving safety in the workplace, while large corporations implement the OHSMS because of the need of a systematic approach for continuous accident prevention [52].
In general, since large companies conduct systematic activities through an organization dedicated to health and safety affairs, small and medium enterprises that have fewer workers tend to have a higher accident rate, and the accident rate decreases with an increasing number of workers [12, 53]. The current results revealed that the accident rate was indeed lower in larger enterprises compared to that in small and medium enterprises (see Table 5). Nevertheless, it is interesting that large corporations with more than 2,000 workers not only had a high accident rate, but that there was no correlation between the implementation of KOSHA 18001 and accident rate.
Finally, this study analyzed the accident reduction rate before and after the implementation of KOSHA 18001, revealing that the accident reduction rate was greater after KOSHA 18001 implementation. This shows that KOSHA 18001 is indeed effective in lowering industrial accidents. Therefore, the hypothesis that the accident reduction rate would be greater after implementation of a health and safety management system as compared to before implementation was supported.
Conclusion
Various studies have examined OHSMS outcomes among enterprises. However, because of the limitations associated with the available data, analyses largely focused on large corporations. Since many small and medium enterprises also implement the OHSMS, their cases must also be included in analyses to elucidate the true effects of the OHSMS.
In this study, accident rates for 7 years were analyzed for small, medium, and large companies that implemented the OHSMS and those that did not. As a result, companies that operated the OHSMS had lower accident rates than those that did not. In addition, as a result of analyzing the accident reduction rate before and after the operation of the OHSMS, the accident reduction rate after the operation of the OHSMS was greater than before the operation of the OHSMS. The effects were especially noticeable for small and medium companies with the OHSMS.
Thus, this study suggests that enterprises that do not utilize the OHSMS should consider doing so to prevent and reduce industrial accidents. Small and medium enterprises with a relatively high industrial accident rate could benefit from the improvement in safety in the workplace resulting from using the OHSMS. Large enterprises could benefit from employing the OHSMS to systematically manage continuous accident prevention. This study suggests that industry- and size-specific features should be also considered to achieve desired health and safety performance outcomes.
As shown in Table 1, KOSHA 18001 comprises the requirements of ISO 45001 (and OHSAS 18001) and additional requirements for Korea’s industrial environment and on-site operability. Therefore, the results can be generalized to enterprises that implemented ISO 45001 (or OHSAS 18001) as well as those that implemented KOSHA 18001 [45].
This study had some limitations. First, more in-depth industry- and size-specific analyses could not be performed regarding the accident reduction rate before and after KOSHA 18001 implementation because of limitations collecting data concerning the two years prior to system implementation. Second, the effects of other systems, such as the quality management system (ISO 9001) and environmental management system (ISO 14001), were not analyzed.
Nevertheless, this study analyzed the effects of the OHSMS by industry and size based on multiple years of data; thus, this study provides foundational data for establishing governmental industrial health and safety policies and promoting health and safety management in enterprises.
Conflict of interest
None to report.
Funding
No funding was received to conduct this research.