Worker Safety

Worker Safety

History

Friedrich Engels, in his classic book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” argued the following: [1]

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call that deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or the bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them… to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence-knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”

Englels coined the phrase “social murder” to explain the systematic and routine killing of workers and citizens in the horror of the early times of industrial capitalism in England.

His friend Karl Marx, about several (English) pieces of legislation enacted in the 18th century known as the Factory Acts, wrote:

“These Acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labor power, by forcibly limiting the working day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist and landlord. Apart from the working class movement which daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labor was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that had in one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation.”

Regulation

In an article about regulation, Braithwaite wrote:

“In business regulation circles these days, there is not much contesting of the conclusion that consistent punishment of business non-compliance would be a bad policy, and that persuasion is normally the better way to go when there is reason to suspect that cooperation with attempting to secure compliance will be forthcoming.”

Resources

Notes

  1. Engels, F. (1969). The condition of the working class in England. Rev. ed. St. Albans, U.K.: Panther Books, page 106.
  2. Marx, K. (1954). Capital (Rev. ed., Vol. 1). London: Lawrence and Wishart, page 229
  3. Braithwaite, J. (2002). Rewards and regulation. Journal of Law and Society, 29, page 20

Further Reading

  • Almond, P. (2013). Corporate manslaughter and regulatory reform. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Almond, P., & Colover, S. (2012). The criminalization of work-related death. British Journal of Criminology, 52, 997-1016.
  • Alvesalo, A. (2003a). The dynamics of economic crime control (Vol. 14). Espoo, Finland: Poliisiammattikorkeakoulun tutkimuksia.
  • Alvesalo, A. (2003b). Economic crime investigators at work. Policing and Society, 13(2), 115-138.
  • Ayres, I., & Braithwaite, J. (1992). Responsive regulation: Transcending the deregulation debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Baldwin, R., & Black, J. (2008). Really responsive regulation. The Modern Law Review, 71, 59-94.
  • Bittle, S. (2012). Still dying for a living: Corporate criminal liability after the Westray mining disaster. Vancouver: UBC Press.
  • Black, J. (2005). The emergence of risk based regulation and the new public management in the U.K. Public Law, Autumn, 512-549.
  • Black, J., & Baldwin, R. (2010). Really responsive risk-based regulation. Law & Policy, 32, 181-213.
  • Black, J., & Baldwin, R. (2012). When risk-based regulation aims low: Approaches and challenges. Regulation & Governance, 6, 2-22.
  • Braithwaite, J (1984). Corporate crime in the pharmaceutical industry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  • Braithwaite, J. (2002). Rewards and regulation. Journal of Law and Society, 29, 12-26.
  • Carson, W. (1979). The conventionalisation of early factory crime. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 7, 37-60.
  • Carson, W. G. (1980). The institutionalisation of ambiguity: Early British factory acts. In G. Geis & E. Stotland, (Eds.). White-collar crime: Theory and research (pp. 142-173). London: SAGE.
  • Carson, W. G. (1982). The other price of Britain’s oil: Safety and control in the North Sea. Oxford: Martin Robertson.
  • Castleman, B. (1979) The export of hazard to developing countries. International Journal of Health Services, 9, 569-606.
  • Catley, B. (2003, July). Philosophy: The luxurious supplement of violence? Paper presented at Critical Management Studies 2003, Lancaster. Retrieved from https://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/philosophy/catley.pdf
  • Clarke, M. (2000). Regulation: The social control of business between law and politics. London: Macmillan.
  • Coleman, J. S. (1987). Toward an integrated theory of white-collar crime. American Journal of Sociology, 93(2), 406-439.
  • Cressey, D. (1989). The poverty of theory in corporate crime research. In F. Adler & W. S. Laufer (Eds.), Advances in criminological theory (pp. 31-55). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
  • Dawson, S., Willman, P., Bamford, M., & Clinton, A. (1988). Safety at work: The limits of self-regulation. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Demaret, L., & Khalef, A. (2004). Two million work deaths a year: Carnage is preventable, ILO says.
  • Engels, F. (1969). The condition of the working class in England. Rev. ed. St. Albans, U.K.: Panther Books.
  • Engels, F. (1850). The English ten hours’ bill. Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-Ökonomische Revue, 4.
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  • Pearce, F., & Tombs, S. (1998). Toxic capitalism: Corporate crime in the chemical industry. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.
  • Pearce, F., & Tombs, S. (2012). Bhopal: Flowers at the altar of profit and power. North Somercotes, U.K.: CrimeTalk Books.
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  • Snider, L. (1991). The regulatory dance: Understanding reform processes in corporate crime. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 19, 209-236
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  • Tombs, S. (2016). Social protection after the crisis: Regulation without enforcement. Bristol, U.K.: Policy Press
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