At a glance
- In February 2025, the Ministry of Employment and Labour (MOEL) announced its Workplace Labour Inspection Plan for 2025.
- The MOEL will address industry-specific structural vulnerabilities and prioritise high-risk industries like construction and shipbuilding.
- Inspections will target workplaces with overlapping vulnerabilities under both the Labour Standards Act and the Industrial Safety and Health Act.
- A new system will identify high-risk workplaces, with proactive inspections based on anonymous tips and employee reports.
- Special inspections will use quantified criteria, such as economic damage and the number of affected workers, and will automatically include workplaces with serious human rights violations.
This article has been reproduced with the permission of the authors Weon Jung Kim, Ki Young Kim, Paul Cho, Beom-Kon Cho and Hoin Lee at Kim & Chang.
In February 2025, the MOEL announced its Workplace Labour Inspection Plan for 2025. The key highlights of the plan are as follows:
Focus on structural reforms and high-risk industries
The MOEL will shift the focus of its inspections from simply identifying individual legal violations to addressing industry-specific structural vulnerabilities that lead to non-compliance. Inspections will therefore prioritise identifying and resolving systemic risk factors that are tied to each industry sectors.
Further, the MOEL will strengthen its oversight in high-risk industries, considering factors such as business forecasts and regional industrial trends. Key sectors include construction and ship building, where wage arrears frequently occur. In addition, the Seoul Regional Employment and Labour Office has designated the 'Information and Communication, Specialised Science and Technology Service Industry' as a key business sector for labour inspections in 2025.
Implementation of Integrated Inspections
The MOEL will conduct integrated inspections targeting workplaces classified as 'complex-issue workplaces'—those deemed high-risk under both the Labour Standards Act (ie labour management violations) and the Industrial Safety and Health Act (ie occupational safety). This approach aims to enhance the effectiveness of inspections by identifying workplaces with overlapping vulnerabilities.
For the construction industry, the MOEL will identify ten major construction companies with histories of serious accidents or frequent wage arrears, conducting inspections across all nationwide construction sites operated by these companies. In this regard, the MOEL will:
- roll out a data-driven screening system to identify high-risk workplaces; and
- strengthen proactive inspections based on anonymous tips and / or employee reports.
Establishment of objective criteria for special inspections
Until now, the MOEL has prioritised its special inspections on workplaces identified by outside sources such as media reports. In 2025, it will instead use quantified criteria such as:
- Economic damage caused by violations.
- Number of affected workers.
Workplaces where workers die due to serious human rights violations (eg, assault by employer, workplace harassment, sexual harassment) or excessive working hours will automatically qualify for special inspections. These special inspections will be conducted under the integrated inspection model outlined in the 'implementation of integrated inspections' section above.
As it is expected that the MOEL will release further details on its labour inspection protocols for 2025, we will follow up with updates in our subsequent newsletters.
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