Corporate Manslaughter and Regulatory Reform

Almond, Paul

doi:10.1057/9781137296276

Cited by 32 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…The issue of control is a complex one and clearly in diffuse structures, control emanates from a variety of sources and the lines of accountability are potentially difficult to follow. It is obvious that where a sole director is linked directly to the death [34] then the case is established and whilst in legal theory the corporate veil remains in place [35], in practice the company and the director are one and the same. The challenging question now is to ask if the criminal law in relation to senior officer's liability for death or workplace injury is effective and if the answer is in the negative to look at new ways to establish liability and more importantly to enhance corporate responsibility.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Directors' liability for death or workplace injury

Dobson

2013

Int Jnl Law Management

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to focus on the liability of directors and senior officers within organisations (primarily companies but partnerships and sole traderships are considered where appropriate) and primarily focus on workplace settings. Design/methodology/approach -Desk-based research was carried out. Findings -The scope of the paper is confined to two major aspects of the criminal law -that of manslaughter, both statutory and at common law and also touches on the range of health and safety offences available to the courts. In terms of manslaughter, under the common law, it is gross negligence that is considered.Research limitations/implications -The paper does not attempt an analysis of forms of civil liability but does reflect on the broader relationship between responsibility of directors and company law. The debate over the responsibility of those in leading positions following death or injury to members of the workforce remains a live and problematic one. It is clearly linked to wider considerations of corporate responsibility. Originality/value -On the one hand, those advocates of a system targeting erring directors in a direct fashion see utilisation of the criminal law (apportioning the full weight of public opprobrium), as the most effective way of improving safety for the workforce. By contrast the opposing view is that senior personnel rarely set out to kill or injure those who work for them and that a better way forward is to consider systemic failings running across an organisation. Linked to this is the notion that placing too much responsibility on companies and the senior personnel at their helm is a disincentive to the entrepreneurial spirit that allows business to flourish.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Directors' liability for death or workplace injury

Dobson

2013

Int Jnl Law Management

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“…Meanwhile, if we turn our focus to the local level, we find that total inspections fell by 75 per cent (to 2014/2015), all notices fell by 57 per cent and convictions (offences) fell by 60 per cent (to 2014/2015). 13 In fact, every single indicator of formal health and safety enforcement activity at national and local levels over roughly a 10-year period pointed in the same direction (Tombs, 2015) Moreover, these significant percentage point falls in enforcement activity have taken place from an already low base. For example, if we take the number of inspections by HSE in 2015/2016 (18,000) relative to the numbers of premises for which its inspectors have enforcement responsibility (some 900,000), we find that statistically, the average workplace can now expect an inspection once every 50 years.…”

Section: Discussion: a Law Unfit For Purpose?mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…This paradox was a central concern of Almond (2013) who argued that the CMCHAct 2007 steers a path between the symbolic need to do something about 'companies that kill ' (2013: 32) while not unduly harming business interests, this itself pointing to a 'deeper set of tensions' regarding legal attempts to control corporate behaviour (2013: 33). Indeed, he seeks to document that the most sustained and thoroughgoing attempts to criminalize corporate killing internationally have been in the most thoroughgoing neo-liberal states.…”

Section: Discussion: a Law Unfit For Purpose?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The UK’s corporate killing law: Un/fit for purpose?

Tombs¹

2017

Criminology & Criminal Justice

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The annual total of occupational deaths in the UK is measured in the tens of thousands, yet the overwhelming majority attract no criminal justice attention. More recently, a very small number of deaths have generated attempts to prosecute companies for manslaughter. In 1996, following a series of multiple fatality 'disasters', the Law Commission proposed for a new law on corporate manslaughter; in 2008, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 came into force. It is with the implementation and effects of this Act that this article is concerned. It begins by setting out the dimensions of the new law before analysing the key themes that have emerged from its use to date. In conclusion, I consider whether the law has proven to be unfit for purpose-which begs the question of what that purpose might have been.

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“…In our view, such debates, while couched in empirical terms, often contain implicit ideological positions (see Almond and Gray ), given that powerful elites in society occupy structurally advantageous positions from which they can influence the ways in which laws are both designed and implemented. For instance, in the area of workplace safety, violations by employers are often viewed as regulatory offenses ( mala prohibita ), a position that is often challenged by researchers who argue that some of these violations should be viewed as crimes ( mala in se ), especially when such violations are repeated by employers in a recidivist manner (see Snider ; Almond , ; Tombs and Whyte , ; Bittle and Snider ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Workplace Violence: Examining Interpersonal and Impersonal Violence among Truck Drivers

Gray¹,

Lindsay²

2019

Law & Policy

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Employees who work alone are at greater risk of workplace violence. One of the higher‐risk lone worker occupations in North America is truck driving. Drawing on interviews with 158 truck drivers across the United States and Canada, this article examines how truck drivers interpret and experience both interpersonal and impersonal forms of workplace violence. Rather than rely on police enforcement and safety regulations, the truck drivers in this study believed that they were primarily on their own with regard to workplace violence. As a result, truck drivers described how they continually engage in informal personal safety strategies in order to decrease their chances of being victimized. These findings reveal how neoliberal responsibilization approaches to health and safety serve to conceal structural patterns of power and risk by containing individual responsibility for safety at the frontline. Overall, this study points to the need for law and policy to better incorporate the frontline experiences of workers when attempting to decrease the risk of workplace violence.

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Corporate Manslaughter and Regulatory Reform

Cited by 32 publications

References 0 publications

Directors' liability for death or workplace injury

Directors' liability for death or workplace injury

The UK’s corporate killing law: Un/fit for purpose?

Workplace Violence: Examining Interpersonal and Impersonal Violence among Truck Drivers

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