Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Law Corporate

Still Dying for a Living

Corporate Criminal Liability after the Westray Mine Disaster

by (author) Steven Bittle

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2012
Category
Corporate, Labor & Industrial Relations, Liability
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780774823593
    Publish Date
    Oct 2012
    List Price
    $95.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780774823609
    Publish Date
    Jul 2013
    List Price
    $32.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774823616
    Publish Date
    Oct 2012
    List Price
    $32.95

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

In 1992, a preventable explosion at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killed twenty-six miners. More than a decade later, the government introduced revisions to the Criminal Code of Canada aimed at strengthening corporate criminal liability. Bill C-45, dubbed the Westray bill, requires employers to ensure a safe workplace and attributes criminal liability to organizations for seriously injuring or killing workers and/or the public.

 

In Still Dying for a Living, Steven Bittle turns a critical eye on Canada’s corporate criminal liability law. Interweaving Foucauldian and neo-Marxist literatures with in-depth interviews and parliamentary transcripts, Bittle reveals how various legal, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding the Westray bill downplayed the seriousness of workplace injury and death, effectively characterizing these crimes as regrettable but largely unavoidable accidents. As long as the primary causes of workplace injury and death are not properly scrutinized, Bittle argues, workers will continue to die in the pursuit of earning a living.

About the author

Awards

  • Winner, Outstanding Publication of the year, National White Collar Crime Consortium (NWCCC)

Contributor Notes

Steven Bittle is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.