Seoul court traces a worker's death to the recovery weeks his employer cut short

The court said A still needed twelve weeks of follow-up observation after his discharge ^[12]. A himself had asked the company for three months ^[5]. Those two estimates are about a week apart ^[17]. The company asked him back before any of that period had run, citing a shortage of staff to handle year-end settlement work ^[6].

The Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service had refused the family's claim on the ground that a proximate causal relationship between the work and the death was difficult to establish ^[10]. The court found that work-related stress had aggravated both the existing brain hemorrhage and the ulcerative colitis beyond their natural rate of progression, triggering the fatal bleed ^[11]. Then it held that proximate cause could be recognized from a normative standpoint even where the link between the stress and the colitis was not clearly proven ^[14]. "A was subjected to extreme work-related stress while he had not recovered his health," the court said ^[15]. "Even while hospitalized as his ulcerative colitis worsened, he worked on a laptop and could not focus on his treatment" ^[16].

The insurer was the defendant here, and the money at issue is the survivor benefits and funeral expenses the family claimed from it ^[1][10]. The payment this ruling opens up comes from the state scheme ^[18]. The account, published Sept. 13 citing legal sources about two months after the July judgment ^[1][19], does not say what those benefits are worth.

The employer put its own request into the record, with its purpose attached: the year-end close ^[6]. A had told it he needed three months ^[5]. He had left hospital with vision in his left eye recovered only about 50% and no ability to walk unassisted ^[4]. After he returned he did the settlement work and all of the general affairs team's duties, and was reprimanded by the company president over his work ^[7].

A later division could read this narrowly, as a case where the aftereffects were unusually well documented and the employer's request explicit ^[4][6]. That would leave ordinary crunch scheduling where it was. The twelve weeks is easy to reuse ^[12]. It needs a discharge record and a return date, not a medical argument about colitis, and I would expect claimants to reach for it first in any case where a worker relapses after coming back early. The normative-causation step is the harder half to bank on; it carried a condition the court itself described as not clearly linked ^[14].