Another man working on railroad tracks died. On the afternoon of September 2, Jeong (44) died after he was hit by a train near the Geumcheon-gu Office Station on Seoul subway line 1. Jeong was a telecommunications engineer with over eighteen years of experience. The fatal accident occurred when Jeong, along with eight of his colleagues, was doing maintenance and repair work on the fiber optic cables during the day when trains were in operation. The exact cause of the accident has not yet been revealed. The accident could have been the result of negligence in monitoring trains or negligence on the part of the driver in keeping his eyes on the tracks. However, Korail says that neither was the cause of the accident. What is important is that the victim was an employee of a contractor hired by Korail.

Deaths on railroad tracks have continued since a worker died while repairing a platform screen door at Seongsu Station in 2013. Workers died in Gangnam Station (2015), Guui Station and the KTX Gimcheon Station (2016), and Noryangjin Station and Onsu Station (2017). It has been an endless procession of deaths. The accident victims were mostly non-rregular workers or outsourced workers. This was consistent with statistics that showed that 90% of deaths from industrial accidents happened to employees of contractors. The latest accident was no exception. When it comes to working on the tracks, a proper communication system for the operation is important. If the supervisor, control center, and driver had properly shared information on the operation and the train's position and status ahead of the cable maintenance work, the death could have been prevented. If the cable workers could not properly share information with Korail, because they were employees of contractors overseeing tasks outsourced by Korail, then it is a big problem.

The death of Kim Yong-gyun, a non-regular worker at the Taean Thermal Power Plant, in December 2018 drew the nation's attention to the poor working conditions of outsourced workers. According to a report recently released by the Special Committee for the Investigation of Labor Safety at Coal-Fired Power Plants to Identify the Truth and Prevent Recurrence of the Death of Kim Yong-gyun, an outsourced worker at a power plant is nine times more at risk of being exposed to accidents and hazards. Meanwhile, they only earned 53% of the wages of regular workers. The situation is probably the same with other contractors. After the death of Kim, the National Assembly amended the Occupational Safety and Health Act (a.k.a. Kim Yong-gyun bill) banning the in-house contracting of hazardous and dangerous tasks and strengthening punishment of employers. But it did not put an end to the outsourcing of danger. Companies hiring contractors argue that outsourcing the operations to a specialized firm increases safety and corporate competitiveness, but in reality the opposite is true.

On September 2, when the death occurred on the track, the branches of Korail subsidiaries including a branch of Korail Networks held a rally and called for the company to directly hire the workers of subsidiaries who conduct tasks concerning safety, such as the train crew and train maintenance workers. They also recommended that the company raise the wages of outsourced workers who conduct the same tasks as the regular workers of Korail to 80% of the wages given to Korail employees. In order to prevent the sacrifices of the outsourced workers, directly employing the employees of partner firms and switching the status of non-regular workers to regular workers is an alternative. This is how we can make sure that Kim Yong-gyun did not die in vain.