Safety Crimes

Every year in the UK, hundreds of workers are killed just doing their jobs, thousands more die of illnesses caused by their work and tens of thousands suffer major injuries such as amputations, loss of sight, serious burns, and so on.

Worldwide, two million people are killed by work each year.

Yet, with the exception of high profile cases such as the gas leak at Bhopal, India, which killed tens of thousands, this crime wave fails to attract the interest of the politicians, or the media.

This book is concerned with crimes against worker health and safety, providing an account and analysis of this increasingly important field, and setting this within the broader context of corporate and white-collar crime.

It uses case studies to illustrate key points and themes, including both the well known and high profile instances of safety crimes but also the larger number of 'mundane' or 'routine' deaths, injuries, ill-health, prosecutions, and enforcement relationships. This book also makes use of a mass of unpublished data from the Health and Safety Executive, providing an intimate view of the work of the organisation in relation to enforcement action, offending, enforcement patterns, case outcomes and sentencing.

Throughout the book, the authors seek to analyse the extent to which safety crimes are typical of corporate and white-collar crimes, but also seek to highlight the peculiarities involved in addressing this particular sub-set of such crimes.

Analysis and arguments are drawn not only from criminal justice and criminology, but draw also on other disciplines such as business and management studies, economics, organisational sociology, political economy and political science to help understand white collar and corporate crime in general and safety crimes in particular.