The academic concept of safety crime was termed by Tombs and Whyte [1] in 2007 in their comprehensive analysis of the legal regulation and punishment of workplace health and safety offences. Tombs and Whyte [2] briefly define safety crime as "violations of law by employers that either do, or have the potential to, cause sudden death or injury as a result of work-related activities". Safety crime is distinct from corporate crime by its reference to injury and death from work-related activities. Considering that corporate crime can involve safety crimes and other crimes congruent with the goals of legitimate organisations, like price fixing, safety crime can be viewed as a sub-genre of corporate crime.
Since Sutherland [3] highlighted the concept of crime in business in the 1940s, crimes of this nature are usually contested and marginalised in academic, political, and public discourse. At the time, for instance, Tappan [4] disagreed with Sutherland's white-collar crime concept on the grounds that Sutherland used the criminal label before official adjudication and therefore entered a sphere of moralising that clashed with the legal system. Tappan's critique demonstrates that the term crime, which has no inherent ontology, is dictated by legal and political motives. It is this subjective nature of crime that introduces contention and barriers to universally accepted definitions - particularly for new suggestions of crime.
The 1972 North American Watergate scandal prompted a re-emergence of academic literature on business-related crime. Throughout the 1970s to 1990s a range of academics pursued white-collar crime-esque research, such as: occupational crime, [5] economic crime, [6] , organized crime, [7] commercial crime, [8] crimes at the top, [9] , crimes of the powerful [10] crimes in the suites, [11] elite deviance, [12] crimes of capital, [13] business crime, [14] organisational crime, [15] and corporate crime. [16] These terms are not simply semantic disputes as almost all of these concepts refer to different types of crime in the workplace. This plethora of different topics did not lead to widespread recognition or understanding, as these terms are often used interchangeably whilst referring to disparate types of crime.
Tombs and Whyte [2] use Pearce and Tombs' [17] corporate crime definition below, with the addition of "violations of law by employers that either do, or have the potential to, cause sudden death or injury as a result of work-related activities", to define safety crime:
Illegal acts or omissions, punishable by the state under administrative, civil or criminal law which are the result of deliberate decision making or culpable negligence within a legitimate formal organisation. These acts or omissions are based in legitimate, formal, business organisations, made in accordance with the normative goals, standard operating procedures, and/or cultural norms of the organisation, and are intended to benefit the corporation itself.
By referring to sudden death or injury, this safety crime definition excludes health and safety offences that cause pernicious harms from illnesses and diseases. This is the intention of Tombs and Whyte as they separate occupational injury offences from occupational health offences, since the latter typically involve a more complex contestable causal chain and thus greater difficulty in identifying the burden of proof.
Tombs and Whyte's introduction of the safety crime term has not achieved widespread recognition in academic, political, or public discourse. The term safety crime has only been used by Alvesalo and Whyte [18] , Tombs and Whyte, [1] and Alvesalo et al. [19] When studies refer to workplace health and safety offences, they are more likely to use the term corporate crime and thereby also inadvertently refer to financial crime, state crime, or environmental crime. Overall, academics agree that the study of safety crime continues to be marginalised in the United Kingdom and most criminal justice systems. [1] [20] [21]
In 2023 the International Labour Organisation [22] estimated that every year 2.93 million workers die as a result of work-related factors, alongside 395 million non-fatal workplace injuries, and $361 billion in costs from injuries and excessive heat in the workplace. In 2017 Hämäläinen [23] noted that most work-related deaths occur in Asia, which had 12.99 fatalities per 100,000 persons employed, followed by America and Europe with fatality rates of 5.12 and 3.02 respectively per 100,000 persons employed (see Occupational safety and health for further information on global occupational injury statistics).
In Great Britain the Health and Safety Executive reported that in 2024–25 124 employees and 92 members of the public died from work-related incidents. [24] The Health and Safety Executive also recorded that in 2023/24 there were: [25]
Similar but technically distinct from safety crime, in 2022 the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities [26] stated that there are between 28,000 and 36,000 annual mortalities from human-made air pollution in the United Kingdom.
In contrast to Health and Safety Executive statistics, the Labour Force Survey estimates significantly higher quantities of non-fatal injuries. In 2023/24 the Labour Force Survey [27] reported 604,000 workplace non-fatal injuries, nearly 10 times as many injuries reported by the Health and Safety Executive. Furthermore, it is commonly accepted amongst safety crime academics that the Health and Safety Executive significantly underreports safety crime and 'omits vast swathes of fatal injuries'. [28] According to Tombs and Whyte [1] [29] [30] there are at least 900 safety crime deaths each year in Great Britain, this being six times larger than the Health and Safety Executive's headline fatality figure. Tombs [28] notes that the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 legislation allows the Health and Safety Executive to exclude certain categories of workplace deaths. This includes deaths from sea fishing and merchant vessels, deaths traveling by air or sea, and most significant, deaths involving a moving vehicle on a public road (other than vehicles involved in loading and unloading operations, working alongside the road such as road maintenance, escapes of substances from vehicles, and incidents involving trains). [31] In 2003 the Health and Safety Executive [32] estimated that a third of all road traffic incidents in Britain are work-related, resulting in approximately 1,000 occupational road fatalities each year. More recently in 2024 The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents [33] corroborated the Health and Safety Executive's suggestion that one third of all road traffic fatalities are work-related, resulting in approximately 500 deaths each year.
The underreporting of safety crime can be ascribed to various obstacles of identifying and convicting those responsible for safety crime. Issues of criminalising the powerful, namely resourceful corporations or high status individuals, are well documented. [34] [35] [36] Tombs and Whyte [1] argue that the following issues cause safety crime to be marginalised and obscured in society:
Many safety crime academics agree that safety crimes are obscured and marginalised in the UK and most societies, [16] [20] [35] termed a ‘collective ignorance’ by Box. [39] The Parliamentary health and safety report, [40] which significantly influenced the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, acknowledged the issue of safety crime underreporting. In 2007 the Health and Safety Executive [41] estimated that employers recorded 30% of employee injuries, rising to 50% of non-fatal injuries in 2024. [42]
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