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A flurry of delivery-worker deaths reported earlier this year generated a great deal of interest and resulted in a rare consensus, with labor, management and the government agreeing that overwork is a problem and something needs to be done about it.

Despite so many meeting eye to eye so quickly, much was lost along the way. It is not all that clear whether the number of deaths is out of the ordinary given the large number of workers in the delivery business and the demographics. The mechanics of the process has also been somewhat glossed over. In a business where so many layers are coordinating to get a package from A to B, it has been easier to talk simply about the massive logistics companies at the top and the poor wretches on the road, leaving out the middlemen and the network of locations that are all important in making sense of the job. It is in the end far more than a traditional management and labor story. It is one of many managements and an abundance of workers at many levels in a tale of moving boxes and shifting responsibility. Importantly it is one in which accountability has been lost in the shuffle as everyone in the equation scrambles to make money in the delivery boom. Q. I hear delivery workers have been overworked. A. The overwork of deliverymen has been an issue for many years. But it recently got a lot of attention when 15 workers died during a very busy time earlier this year. Because of the pandemic, people are ordering more from home, and that has increased the demand for delivery. The number of packages being delivered has increased around 10 percent every year since 2015 in line with the growth of the online market. But the growth this year was somewhat faster than normal. The number of parcels delivered last year totaled 2.79 billion, according to data from Korea Integrated Logistics Association. More than half of that figure, or 1.6 billion parcels, was reached in the first half of this year. But the number of delivery workers has not kept pace. CJ Logistics, which had a 47 percent market share last year, has kept its delivery headcount 21,000. Hanjin Transportation and Lotte Global Logistics increased their numbers by 14 percent and 18 percent, respectively, this year.

Delivery workers load packages onto a truck at a terminal in Seoul on Nov. 13. [NEWS1]

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[Shortcut] Sorting out the delivery deaths - Korea JoongAng Daily