scholarly journals No soul to damn? Revisiting the case for corporate manslaughter in New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mitchell Spence
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Strong Case ◽  
Workplace Health And Safety ◽  
Corporate Manslaughter ◽  
Comprehensive Discussion

<p>Currently a corporation cannot be convicted of manslaughter in New Zealand. Increasingly, this distinction demarcated between individuals and corporations seems out of touch, particularly in light of legislation passed in cognate jurisdictions and the ascendance of a plethora of industrial disasters both in New Zealand and abroad.  Taking as its focus the Report of the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety (2013), this paper contemplates the above issues, concluding that the offence’s alignment with fundamental criminal law principles makes a strong case for its introduction in New Zealand. Consideration is also given to the format and rules of attribution that should accompany a resolve to prosecute corporate manslaughter, finding that a more comprehensive discussion, going beyond the recommendations of the Taskforce, is necessary before any legislation is settled on.</p>

Workplace Welfare and State Coercion

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
GR Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Strict Liability ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Modern Slavery ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Corporate Manslaughter

This chapter explores the possibilities and the limits of a social democratic criminal law. It elucidates an important role for the criminal law in the social democratic state. The first is the positive and important role of regulatory criminalization, based upon strict liability, particularly in the spheres of minimum wage enforcement and workplace health and safety. Health and safety might also be protected through a corporate manslaughter offence. The second is the criminalization of modern slavery offences. The third is the potential role for criminal law to prohibit certain forms of occupation that create unacceptable risks to the health and safety of citizens, such as boxing or sex work. Overall, this chapter provides an important counterpoint to social democratic labour law, and it provides a compelling vision of what a legitimate social democratic criminal law might look like.

scholarly journals How to Regulate the Due Diligence Duties of Officers under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 379
Author(s):  
Nadia Dabee
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Due Diligence ◽  
Regulatory Structure ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Workplace Health And Safety ◽  
Enforcement Activity ◽  
Regulatory Landscape

To date, no enforcement activity against officers under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) has been reported and methods to achieve compliance also appear to be underdeveloped. In addition to there being no prosecutions against officers for breach of their due diligence duties, there are also no formalised regulatory structures to help officers "self-regulate" effectively in order to comply with their due diligence duties. Instead, it appears that officers have been left mostly to regulate their own behaviour with some guidance from WorkSafe. This leaves a gap in the regulatory landscape of workplace health and safety in New Zealand. Opportunities for developing a unique regulatory structure geared towards regulating the due diligence duties become evident upon an examination of some of the literature on regulation. These opportunities are presented here.

Roundtable on OSHA at 20: What Now?

1992 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 50-65
Keyword(s):  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Occupational Safety And Health ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Safety And Health ◽  
Workplace Health And Safety ◽  
The Many

ON A WINTRY DAY LAST DECEMBER, nearly 20 years to the day after the nation's lawmakers approved the Occupational Safety and Health Act that aimed to substantially curb the injury, illness and death that are an everyday fact of life in America's workplaces, New Solutions convened a panel of invited guests at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., to gauge just how far we have come. Earlier, in the premiere issue of New Solutions, we had run Charles Noble's analysis of “OSHA at 20.” It gave us starting points for a searching discussion of workplace health and safety in this country from the many perspectives that were represented by our panelists (see box, page 65). All of the opinions and comments made during the discussion represent the participants' own viewpoints and are in no way a reflection of the opinions or views of the agencies or organizations with which they are associated. We asked panelists Charles Noble and Richard Pfeffer to begin the discussion with their analyses of the problems. The talk went on for hours, all of it captured on tape. Insights were plentiful; frustrations were obvious; the suggestions, many. Here is Part 1 of a two-part edited transcript of the Roundtable on OSHA, the agency that is 20 years old this April, and the OSH Act which established it. Part 2 will run in an upcoming issue of this journal. We invite you to join the controversy with your letters and longer comments.

scholarly journals The Interface of Safety and Security; The Workplace

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-104
Author(s):  
George Boustras
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Organizational Level ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Psychosocial Issues ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Workplace Health And Safety ◽  
Main Factors

Abstract 9/11 had a great impact on the development and occurrence of high publicity security-related incidents. One of the biggest impacts was that to public health, due to an increase in psychosocial issues. Cybersecurity incidents and processes of radicalization (either due to religious, political, or economic reasons) can have a direct result on the workplace as well as at the organizational level, which in turn can affect the worker. The aim of this chapter is to explain the main factors linking safety and security, creating a new area for workplace health and safety, that of the “interface of safety and security”.

Functionalized nanomaterials and workplace health and safety

2022 ◽  
pp. 393-406
Author(s):  
Vildan Erduran ◽  
Muhammed Bekmezci ◽  
Ramazan Bayat ◽  
Zübeyde Bayer Altuntaş ◽  
Fatih Sen
Keyword(s):  
Health And Safety ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Functionalized Nanomaterials ◽  
Workplace Health And Safety

Restorative Regulation of Criminality at Work in Canada

2020 ◽  
pp. 516-534
Author(s):  
Bruce P Archibald QC
Keyword(s):  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Safety Standards ◽  
Criminal Sanctions ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Labour Standards

This chapter suggests a way of enriching the normative theorization of the interface between labour law and criminal law in Canada. It homes in on the role of the criminal law in enforcing worker-protective labour standards, in particular with regard to workplace health and safety. Focusing specially on penal policy in respect of violations of health and safety standards by employing enterprises and by individual members of the staff of those enterprises, this chapter contends that there is real scope for bringing to bear the principles and tenets of restorative justice upon the practice of applying criminal or quasi-criminal sanctions in this regulatory domain. This might generate some more nuanced and creative regulatory approaches than those which are sometimes manifested in high-profile corporate criminal prosecutions and by the imposition of blockbusting fines upon such corporations. Moreover, the chapter argues that certain of the currently much-discussed human capabilities approaches to legal regulation might be deployed to develop and flesh out a methodology of restorative justice in this particular context.

Workplace Safety and Criminalization

2020 ◽  
pp. 391-408
Author(s):  
Paul Almond
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Workplace Safety ◽  
Contextual Features ◽  
Organizational Norms ◽  
Capacity Choice ◽  
Corporate Manslaughter ◽  
Open Question

This chapter argues that the contribution of criminalization to better health and safety in workplaces has been limited by certain contextual features of this regulatory method. It focuses on the role of criminal law in the health and safety legislation and the corporate manslaughter offence. In particular, this chapter argues that criminal law interventions are gravitationally oriented towards individualized notions of fault, capacity, choice, and responsibility. Once the liability enquiry is structured in this highly personalized way, the regulatory capacities of the criminal law to secure effective and enduring structural change is limited. Thus, it remains an open question whether the criminal law can accommodate approaches to responsibility that are more attuned to structures, cultures, and organizational norms.

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