`Suicide caused by English stress meets accident while on duty`

The Supreme Court has ruled that a senior manager who worked for a conglomerate and had committed suicide meets an accident while on duty. The man had given up an opportunity to work overseas due to high pressure caused by insufficient English proficiency. The court announced on Friday that it annulled the original judgment, which was against his wife, the plaintiff, who filed a lawsuit against the Korea Workers’ Compensation & Welfare Service to provide bereaved family’s benefit and funeral service expenses, and sent back the case to Seoul High Court.

The man who was working for company D was appointed as a leader of construction team for a Kuwait plant in July 2008 when he turned himself an eager student who learned English very hard. Three months later, while on a 10-day business trip to Kuwait, he realized that his English proficiency was too poor to work in the foreign country and began to feel depressed. He was promoted to a senior manager in December but had to give up the opportunity to work in Kuwait due to growing psychological burden. Few days later when he was lamenting his humiliation to his colleagues, he took his life by jumping off the 10th-floor rooftop of the company’s headquarters.

Courts of first and second instances didn’t acknowledge a causal relationship between his high-level of stress from English and his suicide since he killed himself after the company accepted his intention to give up the overseas work opportunity. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in favor of his family that his death meets accident while on duty, saying, “He had greatly suffered high-level of work stress and emotional distress before he committed suicide, which led to severer depression, which, in turn, resulted in suicide.”