Law, Regulation, and Safety Crime: Exploring the Boundaries of Criminalizing Powerful Corporate Actors

Abstract

AbstractThis article interrogates the laws that govern safety crimes, harmful but typically unintentional acts of negligence that occur in the production of goods and services. Acts that injure employees at work are commonly depicted in legal discourses as accidents and penalized through administrative laws, although other negligent acts such as driving offences causing injury or death are treated as potentially criminal events. Through a discourse analysis of legal and regulatory texts and documents, the authors argue that the constitution of workplace safety crime is rooted in complex historical factors that shape state responses to corporate wrongdoing. This article documents the roots of this “common sense” view of workplace crime, empirically focusing on Canadian corporate negligence law, and concludes with tentative strategies of resistance and change.