Workplace deaths becoming persistent issue at Coupang

A Coupang employee in his 30s collapsed from cardiac arrest at the canteen of the company’s logistics base in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, at around 10:30 p.m. Friday. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. The worker had been working overnight shifts from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. since September last year. Coupang came under heavy criticism after stating — before the police had determined an exact cause of death — that the employee had a chronic illness, prompting accusations that the country’s largest e-commerce platform operator was attempting to deflect responsibility. The death in Hwaseong came just days after another fatal accident involving a Coupang worker. On Nov. 10 at around 2 a.m., a delivery truck driver on Jeju Island, identified only by his surname Oh, crashed into a street utility pole while working an overnight shift. He died after being transported to a hospital. In the week before his death, the 33-year-old had worked 83.4 hours without a single day off and handled as many as 354 deliveries per day. His working conditions exceeded the InternatWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times