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Break Your Contract, Go to Prison: Governing the Workplace through Crime

By Jonathan Simor

In the 19th century, Parliament turned the work rules of the British railways into a penal statutes. A trainman violating work rules, could find themselves facing not just discipline, but punishment. The growing political power of workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gradually eroded the practice of criminalizing labor disputes, but as the power of workers has declined, and the salience of crime to governance has gone up, governing through crime is becoming a more common way to exercise workplace power (see Chapter 8 of my book).A recent example comes from New York where a group of Filipino nurses found that when they tried to quit their jobs at a hospital for critically ill children, they were facing not just unemployment, but criminal charges of child endangerment...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on January 28, 2008 (boomark / email).