South Korea’s ‘pali-pali’ spirit keeps killing its workers

South Korea builds fast. It always has. The pali-pali (hurry, hurry) spirit turned a war-ravaged nation into an industrial titan in a single generation. It also has a habit of killing factory workers, safety experts say.Those deadly consequences were on full display in Friday’s fire at Anjun Industrial, a car parts supplier in Daejeon.The warning signs were impossible to miss. Oil vapour so thick it coated the lenses of workers’ glasses with a greasy film. Grease caking the ceilings, the pipes, the machinery. Repeated pleas for ventilation improvements, met with silence.Friday’s fire killed 14 people. Nine of them died in a single room that should not have existed.That room – an illegally constructed rest area built by splitting a single-storey space into two levels – appeared on no official blueprints. Its one small side window offered no escape from the toxic gases that filled it.Firefighters and forensics teams work at the fire-damaged factory in Daejeon on Saturday. Photo: XinhuaIt was a death trap hiding in plain sight: the product of makeshift expansions carried out in 2010, 2011 and 2014 that authorities never properly identified or addressed, investigators and safety experts told This Week in Asia.