CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Safety Groups Push for Criminal Crackdown in Worker Death Cases
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Corporate Crime Reporter 17(1), April 20, 2005
A national coalition of workplace safety advocates has launched a campaign for
increased criminal prosecution of corporations responsible for workplace deaths.
The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health has launched a “stop
the corporate killers” campaign.
The campaign will seek to pressure local prosecutors to bring criminal homicide
prosecutions against corporations that flagrantly and consistently violate safety
and health laws and whose actions result in worker deaths.
The campaign will also seek passage of tougher new criminal penalties at the
federal level.
The council is a federation of 22 non-profit organizations around the United
States that advocates for worker safety and health.
Roger Cook, director of the western New York Council on Occupational Safety
and Health, is leading the campaign for a criminal crackdown.
Cook said that campaign was sent into overdrive last month when 15 workers were
incinerated, and more than 70 injured, following an explosion at BP's sprawling
refinery in Texas City, Texas.
Cook said that BP has some of the highest records of accidents, injuries and
fatalities in the refinery industry, is a persistent violator of Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations and industry safety guidelines,
is a beneficiary of OSHA's lax penalties, could have prevented most of the accidents,
and uses non-union outside contractors which often cut corners when it comes
to safety and health.
Cook said that the national organization’s campaign for criminal prosecution
“hopes to raise the public visibility of both corporate malfeasance and
of OSHA's often pitiful response.”
“We hope to take tragic cases like the BP explosion to push for a criminal
law that will
make it possible to send negligent managers to jail as well as advocate for
District Attorneys bringing criminal charges at the local level,” Cook
said.
Earlier this month, the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers
(PACE) Intl. Union voted to merge with the United Steelworkers of America.
At their convention in Las Vegas, the new Steelworkers passed a resolution vowing
to “fight for effective U.S. legislation that will impose meaningful criminal
penalties on employers who cause the death of workers through corporate misconduct.”
For years, workplace safety advocates have decried the sorry state of federal
criminal occupational safety and health law.
“Under current law, a prosecutor has to show that you intentionally violated
an OSHA workplace standard,” said Michael Wright, the director of health
and safety for the Steelworkers Union. “You have to show that that violation
resulted in the death of a worker. And then the most the prosecutor can get
for a sentence is six months in jail.”
“If you harass a wild burro on federal land you can get five years,”
Wright said. “If you damage coral reef you get five years.”
Wright said that he favors extending the criminal law to cover not just worker
deaths, but also serious injuries, and to cover not just intentional violations
of an OSHA standard, but also intentional violations of the general duty clause.
And he would dramatically increase the jail time for corporate executives convicted of workplace safety laws.
Wright said that about 8,000 Americans are killed on the job every year and
he suspected that even with a toughened criminal law, only a very small minority
of these deaths would result in a federal criminal prosecution.
“The criminal law expresses societal values,” Wright said. “Putting
a tough law on the books with significant criminals penalties sends a message
that workers lives are valuable.”
But Wright questioned the wisdom of aggressive local district attorneys criminally
investigating every workplace death to determine corporate criminal culpability
for homicide.
“When criminal prosecution starts, constitutional protections for corporations
kick in,” Wright said. “So no, we do not think that every workplace
death or injury should automatically trigger a criminal investigation.”
Corporate Crime Reporter
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