Safety by design: Labor Ministry pushes color-coded workplace hazard system

The Ministry of Employment and Labor is rolling out a workplace safety design initiative across industrial sites nationwide, using color coding, signage and clearly marked pathways to help workers identify hazards at a glance.

Employment and Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon visited CJ CheilJedang's factory in Saha-gu, Busan on Wednesday to review how the safety design approach has been applied and to hear directly from workers on the floor.

Workplace safety design is a visual improvement technique that uses color, signage and traffic routing to help older workers, foreign nationals and others quickly and accurately recognize on-site hazards. It is used to separate forklift and other cargo-handling equipment zones from pedestrian walkways, and to make evacuation routes easier to follow in emergencies such as fires.

The CJ CheilJedang Busan factory, which employs about 900 full-time workers, has clearly separated pedestrian and forklift routes at intersections and crosswalks. Safety design has also been applied to the factory floor and emergency exits to improve the visibility of evacuation routes.

CJ CheilJedang said it redesigned the workplace to move away from relying on individual workers' caution and self-control, creating an environment where anyone can intuitively recognize danger and act safely.

"Telling workers to be careful is not enough to ensure safety," Kim said. "We need to move toward a system where the work environment itself does the work — where dangerous areas are instinctively avoided and safe routes are found by instinct."

He added that intuitive safety design elements such as floor colors and lines are "an effective tool for breaking down communication barriers faced by foreign, daily-hire and older workers," and pledged to provide full technical and financial support to help successful cases spread across industrial sites.

The ministry and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency are covering 50 to 70 percent of workplace safety design improvement costs — up to 100 million won ($74,300) — for manufacturers with fewer than 50 workers through the Clean Workplace Support Program. Prime contractors that help cover part of the safety design costs for outside subcontractors are also eligible for government support.