Introduction

Given that the National Day of Mourning is on April 28, I thought that it was appropriate to write another post on this topic. I provide some quotes from various sources to show how worker health and safety is, in one way or another, not taken all that seriously in a society dominated by a class of employers.  not conceived as a problem on the same level as violent personal acts that result in injury. 

I divide this post into three parts. First, I provide some quotes about how the legal system treats health and safety problems that lead to injury as substantially different from violent personal acts that result in injury. Second, I provide some quotes that address why this situation exists and persists–specifically, the fact that worker health and safety is a cost for employers and therefore reduces a surplus of value and profit. Third, I provide some quotes that propose solutions to the problem.

As an appendix, I quote some rhetoric from the union movement about health and safety in the workplace. 

A Crime by any other Name 

If employer actions (or inactions, as the case may be) that lead to physical or mental harm were treated as individual acts of violence that lead to physical or mental harm, employers would likely not exist since there is often negative consequences for workers’ health and well-being. From Jason Foster and Bob Barnetson (2016), Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces: 

Box 2.3 Safety crimes?

If you ran someone down in a parking lot, you would most likely face criminal prosecution and jail time—even if your action was unintentional. Yet, if you did the same thing on a worksite, you would mostly likely not be charged with a crime. Instead you (or your employer) might face prosecution under OHS legislation (although probably not) and the penalty most likely would be a fine, even if the violation resulted in a worker’s death.

That we treat workplace injuries differently from injuries that happen elsewhere shows that we socially construct workplace injuries differently from injuries that are the result of so-called criminal acts. In effect, safety violations are viewed as regulatory offences: offences that are wrong because they violate a law rather than being inherently immoral (i.e., a crime). For this reason, governments generally choose to regulate corporate misbehaviour through persuasion and education rather than through punishment.

This framing of safety violations as regulatory offences is itself premised on the notion that employers and workers are “reasonable, of good faith, and motivated to heed advice.” The view of corporate activities as generally desirable combined with the widely adopted employer view that the risk of workplace injury is minimal, unavoidable, and acceptable (and likely the fault of workers anyhow) may help explain why corporate behaviour that
injures workers is constructed as a regulatory violation rather than as a crime.

A case in point is the exposure of miners to ionizing radiation at Elliot Lake in Ontario. No one was charged, let alone convicted. From Foster and Barneston: 

Box 4.4 The Elliot Lake strike and the origins of OHS

As we saw in Chapter 2, comprehensive injury-prevention legislation was only enacted in the late 20th century. One of the catalyzing events was an April 1974 wildcat strike by 1000 uranium miners from Elliot Lake, Ontario, that lasted three weeks. A wildcat strike is an unsanctioned, spontaneous strike by workers. The workers struck over high levels of radiation exposure, and Elliot Lake was one of Canada’s first health- and safety-related
walkouts.

Officials from the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), the union representing the workers, had just returned from a uranium safety symposium in France, where they became aware of a study by the Ontario Ministry of Health that showed Elliot Lake miners
were three times more likely to die of lung cancer than the rest of the population. The culprit was radiation caused by the release of radioactive radon gas during uranium mining.

The news hit the workers like a bombshell. They did not even know the government was studying them. The workers walked out immediately after the union meeting where the study was revealed. For 10 days, the employer refused to even talk to the workers about
the issue, and only agreed to negotiate around safety issues after the strikers refused to return to work.

The workers were particularly angry that both the employer and the government had long known the workers were being exposed to dangerous radon gas but had said and done nothing. As striker Ed Vance put it: “They deliberately kept us ignorant. There is no other
way to describe it. Government has a responsibility and in this case they failed to keep the workers advised. They failed to warn the workers of their work environment. And, they were part of that conspiracy.”

The efforts of the Elliot Lake workers eventually resulted in changes to OHS rules. As for the employers, “[the mining companies] were brought in kicking and screaming” to protecting workers, says former miner and President of USWA, Leo Gerard. Elliot Lake revealed how employers’ economic interests combined with the state’s role in maintaining production (in this case, by supporting employers’ interests) can lead to the injury or death of workers.

The Elliot Lake strike, and other direct action taken by workers in defence of their health in the early 1970s, forced governments to do more to protect workers’ health. Within a few years, Ontario’s first Occupational Health and Safety Act was passed and more stringent controls placed upon radiation exposure and other hazards. Other jurisdictions soon followed suit (Saskatchewan actually passed Canada’s first OHS act in 1972). The disturbing question that lingers is whether any of these legislative changes would have come about if the group of miners hadn’t decided they were no longer prepared to die because of their job.

No one was charged for knowingly exposing the miners to radiation. 

Note that this situation was a combination of an impersonal situation and a personal one: no one personally intended to increase the likelihood that miners would fall victim to lung cancer; however, the fact that the employer and the government kept silent about the known dangers does reflect personal intent to injure, not specific miners, but the miners at Elliot Lake in general. No one was charged of criminal actions, let alone convicted.

How extensive are employers’ actions and decisions that lead to worker injury, disease and death? Quite extensive. From Harry Glasbeek, Capitalism: A Crime Story: 

David Whyte of the U.K. reports on the incidence of health and safety harms. His overview led him to conclude that

“managements are responsible—and are legally liable—for the majority of deaths
caused by working … we can say with little doubt that the minority of deaths caused by working can be regarded purely as “misfortunes” or “accidents” which were not
avoidable … the majority of deaths at work do not result from “out of control” or
haphazard circumstances, but are the result of decisions or non-decisions that could… be traced to the authors of those decisions.” [emphases added by Glasbeek]

Or again: 

Among the two million deaths, 270 million injuries, and 160 million occupational related diseases inflicted per annum worldwide, a miniscule number are suffered by employers.

I asked artitificial intelligence (ChatGPT) how many personal murders occur worldwide: 

Globally, about 400,000 to 450,000 people are murdered each year as a result of intentional interpersonal violence (i.e. personal crime rather than war or state violence). This figure is based on estimates from organizations like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

To break it down:

• The UNODC’s 2019 Global Study on Homicide estimated the annual global homicide rate at around 6 per 100,000 people, which corresponds to about 437,000 murders per year.

• The majority of these murders are committed with firearms or sharp objects, and men (especially young men) are both the most common perpetrators and victims.

• Regions with higher murder rates include Latin America and the Caribbean, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and some areas in Asia.

• In contrast, places like Western Europe, Japan, and parts of East Asia have very low homicide rates.

Safety Does Not Pay–It Costs Money–It Is a Risk to Workers’ Health and Safety that Pays

Since workers’ health and safety, from an employer’s point of view,  often involves an expenditure of money, and such an expenditure eats into surplus value and therefore profit (see    The Money Circuit of Capital ) , it is the lack of safety which pays, not safety. From Jason Foster and Bob Barnetson (2016), Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces: 

Box 2.5 Does safety pay?

Many safety professionals assert that “safety pays.” More specifically, they assert that organizations can increase their profitability by reducing the rate of workplace injury. Yet, rather oddly, there is no good evidence that this statement is true.

But you don’t need to be a researcher to know that. We know, from Chapter 1, that employers in capitalist economies are driven by the profit imperative. Essentially, employers generally seek to maximize profitability and organize work accordingly. If safety paid (i.e., was profitable), we would expect to see very few injuries because employers would eliminate injuries.

Yet what we see is, in fact, millions of workplace injuries each year. This strongly suggests that it is not safety that pays but rather a lack of safety. Basically, organizing work unsafely—using dangerous materials, failing to take safety precautions, or asking
workers to work as quickly as possible—may be highly profitable. While there certainly are costs associated with workplace injury, employers can externalize many of these costs—pass them off—onto workers, their families, and taxpayers.

Injured workers may just “suck it up” and carry on. Their families may support them while they are injured. Workers and other taxpayers may pay for medical treatments and social
assistance costs if the injury is not reported or accepted through workers’ compensation. As we’ll see, when workers do report injuries to the workers’ compensation system, the costs of those injuries are (mostly) spread across all employers in an industry
group.

Andrew Hopkins examined the question of who benefits from injury reduction in Australia. Of the $20 billion of estimated injury costs, 70% of the benefits of eliminating injuries accrued to workers and the state. This distribution of benefits creates very little incentive for employers to reduce injuries.

Hopkins goes on to note that employers may not be significantly affected by large-scale accidents. For example, the death of 3000 and the injury of 300,000 people following a 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India, resulted in large short-term costs to Union Carbide. Nevertheless, corporate restructuring led to record earnings per share in 1988.

One of the less obvious effects of the “safety pays” narrative is that it downplays the need for more stringent government enforcement of OHS laws. If safety pays, the logic goes, why would the state need to check to see if employers had acted in what
is (allegedly) the employers’ best interest?

The last paragraph expresses both a demand by workers and the inadequacy of such a demand. “More stringent government enforcement of OHS laws” will only reduce the incentive for employers to engage in unsafe businesses; it will not eliminate the incentive–and it will be workers’ health, safety and lives that will pay for the continued power of employers to make decisions about the workplace. 

Employers often know that there are physical hazards, but they either hide the results of research showing linkages between a workplace hazard and its negative health consequences or they minimize its impact: 

While the 1970s is generally seen as the beginning of concern over lead, research by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz found that governments, scientists, and corporations knew of many of these dangers in the 1920s. For example, on October 26, 1924, five
workers died due to lead poisoning and another 35 exhibited severe neurological symptoms as a result of occupational exposures in the Standard Oil experimental labs in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This was one of many workplace incidents related to lead exposure.
Employers, including General Motors, DuPont, and Standard Oil, sought to quell growing public concern by linking leaded gasoline to industrial progress, noting that innovation entails risk and suggesting the workplace injuries and fatalities were the result
of worker carelessness. Herein we see the traditional employer perspective at work: the risk of injury is minimal, unavoidable, and acceptable. Never mind that the facts show the risk of injury was significant (80% of workers were poisoned!) and could have been
avoided by not using lead.

Physical hazards while working for an employer do not arise by accident; they form a necessary aspect of treating workers as costs since the reduction or elimination of such hazards often involve costs which reduce the surplus of value available for employers and therefore their profit. It is in the economic interests of employers to cut corners, and the legal system makes it difficult to prosecute employers as negligent, let alone as murderers. From pages 33-34: 

… in early 2010, in a move reflective of a growing frustration with the
lack of Westray bill charges and convictions, the Steelworkers launched a private
prosecution in relation to the death of a sawmill employee in New Westminster,
British Columbia. Lyle Hewer died on 17 November 2004 when he was smothered
to death while cleaning debris from a machine that converts wood to chips – a grinding machine referred to as a hog. Managers of the sawmill, owned by Weyerhaeuser, instructed Hewer to clean out the backed-up machine despite knowledge of the dangers of undertaking such work [my emphasis]. The Crown decided
against proceeding with a criminal prosecution, despite recommendations
to the contrary by the provincial regulator, Worksafe British Columbia,
and the local police. It was at this juncture that the Steelworkers launched a
private prosecution (Lau 2011; Sinclair 2011).

In August 2011, a lower court judge approved the Steelworkers’ case against Weyerhaeuser, which alleged that the company was criminally negligent for Hewer’s death (Canadian Labour Reporter 2011; Lau 2011). Once again, the Crown declined to proceed with criminal charges (private prosecutions ultimately require the Crown’s approval), concluding that the required “charge assessment standard” had not been met and that the evidence did not “provide a substantial likelihood of conviction against the company” (British Columbia Criminal Justice Branch 2011). The Steelworkers reacted angrily, arguing that the case involved obvious negligence that cried out for Westray bill charges. Union officials added that the failed prosecution meant that they would turn
their attention to lobbying the federal government to take the necessary steps
to ensure the Westray bill’s enforcement (United Steelworkers of America 2011).

Injuring, causing people to suffer disease and killing people does often pay in a society dominated by the class of employers.

Some Possible Solutions

The most immediate solution that often comes to mind is increased regulation of corporations and better enforcement. Better enforcement would probably be better than increased regulations since regulations with lack enforcement only motivates employers to engage in unsafe decisions. 

Another possible solution could be Glasbeek’s suggestion that specific individuals of large corporations be held criminally accountable for health and safety violations and that such specific individuals are generally readily identifiable: 

As corporations are given their agenda and character by those who use them to privately accumulate socially produced wealth, it is they, the sentient, individual capitalists, who should be targeted for the built-in risk-creation and risk-shifting that is the hallmark of corporate capitalism. In other work, I have compiled the data and made the argument that, although there are many kinds of investors in corporations, in most jurisdictions in the world (the exceptions being the U.S. and the U.K.), there are easily identifiable capitalists who control the bulk of corporations and who are in a position to set the
agenda for the corporation and who give it its character. By way of illustration, note that, in Australia, in 100 major listed corporations, 5 shareholders controlled 54 per cent of the shareholding; 10 controlled 64 per cent and 20 shareholders in these corporations controlled 70 per cent of the shares. In short, a very few, easily identifiable people (contrast institutional investors) are beneficiaries and controllers of corporate conduct. In Canada, out of 247 publicly traded corporations, a mere 67 could be said to have diffuse ownership; the remainder had one to five shareholders in control of their shares and voting powers. It is relatively easy to see which capitalists drive corporations (or blithely permit them) to behave as they do. The same is true in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Argentine, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Austria, Belgium,
Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland … Even as the actual legal relations and duties and obligations in these jurisdictions differ, the degree of control by identifiable beneficiaries is very similar. It is entirely feasible and makes eminent legal and moral sense to ensure that law, infused with liberal principles, should be made to hold flesh-and-blood driving capitalists hiding behind corporations responsible for the costs and injuries their corporations impose on others.

However, given that the health and safety of workers in a society dominated by a class of employers will always be in jeopardy since there are financial motives for cutting corners, such a solution would only diminish the problem, not resolve it. 

Furthermore, to actually have such a law passed would require considerable class organization and struggle. If the working class needs to be better organized and strive for more power in order to achieve such a goal, it might as well strive to end the class power of employers, with real criminal corporate accountability being one link in a move towards challenging the class power of employers in order to organize working conditions on the safeest possible basis. 

 This is in essence what Steve Tombs and David Whyte (2015) argue in The Corporate Criminal: Why Corporations Must Be Abolished, pages 173-175: 

If the corporation is inherently, essentially destructive, then eradicating the harms it produces means eradicating the very form itself. The mitigation of corporate crime and harm can, ultimately and effectively, only be furthered through the abolition of the corporation per se [my emphasis]. This, of course, sounds wildly utopian. But as a matter of political strategy here, we should note the well-worn analytical and practical distinction between reforms that are merely reformist and those that have the potential to be transformative. On the latter, the key task must be to attack the legal basis upon which corporate power and irresponsibility is constituted – legal personhood, from which follows so many of the features of the corporate form. It is no coincidence, then, that ending legal personhood was one of the original demands of Occupy Wall Street. Although those proposals are hardly likely to be adopted in any meaningful form, they are visible on mainstream political agendas and they are beginning to be visible in some academic work
that has engaged politically with the possibility of reforming or abolishing limited liability protections (Plesch and Blankenburg, 2008; Blankenburg et al., 2010). The debate
on the privileges afforded by the legal construction of  corporations as ‘persons’ also reached the US Congress when Bernie Sanders, Senator for Vermont, introduced a Bill to
abolish the recognition of corporate persons in the US constitution in December 2011. The Bill sought to overturn a decision made by the US Supreme Court in January 2010. In this case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the US Constitution to fund parties standing in elections. Although
the Bill fell, similar Bills have been supported in several state legislatures. The Bill also gave impetus to a wider movement based around the umbrella organisation Move to Amend that has developed a popular basis for the campaign against corporate personhood.

But there are other non-reformist reforms that might appear more within our grasp. These take the form of attacking the legal separation between the corporate person and
those who own, control and direct the corporate entity. A key instance of this was the possibility that, during the tortuous passage of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, positive duties as regards health and safety might be placed upon directors; thus an early Home Office consultation document on the law proposed that alongside a corporation being convicted for manslaughter, company directors should be able to be disqualified if it was found that their conduct had ‘contributed’ to the company committing the offence, while the government also stated that it ‘would welcome comments’ on whether company directors should be able to be prosecuted for such conduct (Home Office, 2000). Ultimately organised lobbying from employers organisations, and notably the Institute of Directors, saw the potential criminalisation of directors removed from the law (see Chapter 3). Yet this debate represented a sustained period in which there was a genuine possibility to pierce what we have described here as the de facto corporate veil. A further reform that seeks to attack the integrity of the corporate veil is Coffee’s (1981) argument for a system of ‘equity’ fines against owners of corporations on conviction. This proposal for ‘equity fines’ entails offending companies being ordered by a court or regulatory authority to issue a set number of new shares in the firm. The shares would then be controlled by a state-controlled compensation fund. More radically, these could be handed over to a victims’ or campaigning organisation, or a (relevant) trade union. This process, which effectively dilutes the value of shares held by the owners of the company, prevents the corporation simply passing on the costs of a sanction to customers through price increases or to workers through job or wage cuts, since the funds for investment would not be depleted, merely reallocated from existing shareholders to the compensation fund. Similar proposals have been debated – though rejected – by
the Scottish parliament in 2010.

Such proposals, however radical they may appear, can only at the moment be an interim demand and tactic in the abolition of the corporate form per se. But this transformative
goal is furthered through each of those intermediate demands we have indicated, because each has the effect of disrupting, disturbing and undermining the legal bases upon which the corporation is structured.

Conclusion

So-called accidents at work that lead to a high level of injuries, disease and killings in the context of a society dominated by a class of employers are actually an integral part of such a society since workers are mere costs for employers–and the legal system provides not only provides insufficient protection but covers over the criminal nature of corporate actions. Possible solutions could be more stringent regulations and enforcement; however, such solutions will remain inadequate in protecting workers in the face of class power of employers’ attempts to circumvent such regulations and enforcement. A more radical solution would be to hold specific individuals within corporations criminally responsible–with the proviso that such an interim solution would be a link along the road to the abolition of the class power of employers. 

Appendix

1. From Unifor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAwtG7rI8vw):
   

   Hello, Unifor family.

   We pause on April 28th, the day of mourning to renew our collective commitment to health and safety.

   And to remember and mourn all workers killed or injured because of their work.

   To the families, loved ones, coworkers and communities of our members lost this past year, please know you’re not alone. We stand with you today, tomorrow, and the day after that.

   There is nothing more important to the work of our union than to make sure every worker leaves their workplace at the end of their shift and goes home safely to their family and friends.

   Keeping working people safe is difficult and challenging.  Too often, union activists are up against powerful corporations who put profits ahead of worker safety.
   Bosses may pressure or intimidate workers to perform dangerous work.

   
   So we must support each other in exercising the right to refuse. We must be ever vigilant to be ready to use our union power to push regulators and to exercise our rights under the law while demanding new rights so we can protect workers all across this country.

   Safe work should be a given, and yet we know it is not automatic. We must organize and fight for it every day. Just last month, we marked the 20th anniversary
   of the enactment of the Westray Law. This law was won by unions who fought for a decade for justice for the 26 miners who lost their lives in a preventable explosion at the Westray Mine in Nova Scotia.

   The Westray law means corporations and their executives cannot be complacent or negligent when it comes to safety, and they can be held criminally responsible if workers are harmed.

   Almost 1,000 workers die on the job each year in Canada. One worker’s death is one too many. So we have work to do. 

   Remember, it is up to us to put the health and safety of our members and all workers at the heart of the work we do as a union. It is up to us to organize, to ensure employers, governments, regulators and workers compensation boards respond the way that we need them to.

   Sisters and brothers and friends, we walk together, even in the dark times, with hope in our hearts and with the knowledge that it is our union and our solidarity that gives us strength. We must always be vigilant in our fight to advance health and safety protections for workers through legislation and through collective bargaining.

   Having a democratic voice, a union at work makes a huge difference. We know this. Unifor is committed to changing our workplaces for the better.

   I invite every member to be a health and safety advocate. We can never have too many. We can build a better and safer world through our collective actions.

   And when we organize for the world that we also know is possible. Today and every day.  Remember, it is our union that gives us the power to demand better.

   Stay safe, my friends, and all my solidarity. 

   [Lana Payne, Unifor National President]

2. From the Canadian Labour Congress (https://canadianlabour.ca/events/day-of-mourning-ceremonies-2025/): 

Day of Mourning Ceremonies 2025

April 27, 2025 at 12:00 AM –
April 28, 2025 at 11:59 PM

April 28th is the labour movement’s most solemn day, but also one to refocus our commitment to preventing future workplace injuries and deaths. Every year, thousands of workers, friends and families of fallen workers gather at ceremonies across Canada to recognize the National Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured on the job.

This year, we will gather in communities across the country. As we mourn for the dead, the Canadian Labour Congress continues to fight for the living.