Regional companies have called for changes to rules they say are detached from conditions on the ground, from occupancy fees for offshore wind farms that vary by dozens of times depending on nearby land prices to rising safety-manager hiring costs caused by different laws applying to different facilities within a single petrochemical plant.
The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry said on the 15th that it had gathered 75 proposals from companies through regulatory roundtables held at five regional chambers of commerce — northern Chungcheongnam-do, Hwaseong, Ulsan, Yeosu and Daejeon — and submitted them to the public-private regulatory reform task force.
The most prominent example of unreasonable regulation cited was the method for calculating occupancy and usage fees for public waters used by offshore wind power facilities. Because fees are currently set based on the price of the land closest to the public waters in question, projects using the same sea can face sharply different charges: the West and South coasts, dotted with islands, benefit from the low land prices of nearby islands, while the East Coast, where islands are scarce, is subject to higher mainland land prices. Companies in Ulsan said fee differences of more than several dozen times arise depending on whether islands are nearby, and asked the government to create a separate calculation standard that reflects the characteristics of offshore wind projects and the use value of the sea rather than nearby land prices.
Many of the proposals concerned workforce use. The petrochemical industry described the burden of having to secure separate safety managers and deputies because different laws apply to each piece of equipment, including hazardous-material tanks, high-pressure gas facilities and boilers. Companies assign safety personnel to each shift because operations run around the clock, but the legal basis for allowing an employee holding multiple certifications to serve concurrently as a safety manager and deputy under different laws is unclear, making additional hiring unavoidable. One plant manager who attended a roundtable said that even when the company hires employees holding five or six certificates, they cannot hold concurrent posts, and urged the government to establish grounds for allowing concurrent service as a deputy where safety is not compromised.
The shipbuilding industry, which relies heavily on foreign labor, asked that the quota for hiring foreign general skilled workers (E-7-3), temporarily raised in 2023, be maintained. Companies also proposed broadening the range of jobs open to the spouses of these workers to include manufacturing and other key regional industries, to help the workers settle with their families.
Differing regulatory standards across local governments also came under scrutiny. For simple warehouses on factory grounds, the enforcement decree of the Building Act currently permits only tarpaulin and synthetic resin, leaving more durable steel plate to be governed by local ordinances. Only some regions that have revised their ordinances allow steel plate, so companies in areas without such ordinances bear the risk of typhoon damage and spend hundreds of millions of won every three to four years replacing tarpaulin. Companies asked that the enforcement decree be revised so steel plate can be used for simple warehouses anywhere in the country.
Lee Jong-myung, head of the KCCI's industrial growth division, stressed that regulatory reform should fix the system where problems are raised repeatedly across multiple regions, while resolving other issues in ways suited to local conditions. The chamber plans to continue the roundtables in the fourth quarter with its regulatory reform committee, visiting the Mokpo and Gwangju chambers to collect further proposals from the field.