President Lee Jae Myung has spoken out on workplace safety during a visit to a factory run by the food and bakery giant SPC Group, where he called for an end to industrial accidents caused by employers prioritizing cost savings over the lives of workers.

Lee made the remarks Friday in a meeting with SPC Group Chairman Hur Young-in, SPC laborers and other industry representatives, in response to a series of fatal accidents at SPC plants.

Mentioning his own past as a laborer and as the victim of an industrial accident, Lee said it is a problem when the same kind of accident keeps happening in the same workplace.

Emphasizing that many such accidents can be foreseen and prevented, the president said there is an imbalance between the cost of prevention and the price to be paid when an accident occurs.

Lee then said Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon has his work cut out for him, pledging action to improve the country’s industrial workplace environment so it is on par with those of other advanced nations and to seek concrete ways to reduce deaths from industrial accidents.