Teaching Criminology: Part V

A. Definition: Corporate crime is those actions by corporate management and employees which harm workers, customers, competitors or communities.

Unlike white collar or street crime, the direct beneficiaries of corporate crime are not those who engineer the many crimes found in modern corporate life. Employees do benefit indirectly; they keep their jobs, they get promoted, they secure the economic base upon which their livlihood depends.

Direct beneficiaries are removed and remote from the actual criminal activity; those of us who own stock, who own annuities based upon stocks; who own mutual funds, the performance of which affects our investment decisions.

B. The fluidity and variability of causality can be seen nowhere as readily as in corporate crime. Yet there are three generic and interacting sources of corporate crime which, in all their human genius and well-developed skills, corporate executives pursue:

1. Increase of Profits/decrease in costs
2. Increase in demand/decrease in competition
3. Control of markets, workers, supplies and the governing apparatus...especially in democratic societies.

C. In its more pro-social moments, capitalism well serves the human interests in food, shelter, communication, transport, knowledge and recreation.

Even at its worse, capitalism provides enough surplus which makes poverty in advanced capitalist societies more tolerable than in slavery, feudalist, and some horticultural political economies. It is this capacity to provide goods and services which make those victimized by corporate crime more tolerant and less critical than radical criminologists might expect.

D. Yet there are many factors which drive corporations to crime, especially in democratic societies.

In democratic societies, elected officials as well as state functionaries depend upon the electorate to keep their jobs...thus, there remains tension between contra- dictory goals of the capitalist state:

1. Political legitimacy [with workers, customers]
2. Capital acculumulation [for owners]
3. Social Stability [for both workers and owners]

E. Forms of Corporate Crime:

1. Crimes against workers: Dangerous working conditions, exploitation of labor power, alienation of social power as well as moral power are among the more generic crimes to be found within corporate life...these vary with strata but even the highest officers lose moral agency in pursuit of corporate goals above.

2. Crimes against customers: price fixing, abandonment of low profit but essential lines of production, dangerous additives/products, default on guarantees, colonization of consciousness via advertizing/subversion of social/ human values--institution of desire for material goods.

3. Crimes against competitors: price wars, industrial espionage, patent/copyright infringement, false rumors/false claims, resource monopolies, super-exploitation of suppliers, as well as hostile take-overs and more.

4. Crimes against the state/governance processes: bribery of legislators/inspectors, evasion of taxes, externalization of costs to the state [education, capital construction, environmental pollution], abandonment of low-profit lines, purchase of the political process, subversion of fiscal monetary, currency laws/policies among others.

F. Magnitude of Corporate Crime. The number of deaths engineered by corporations by unsafe working conditions, unsafe products, recourse to military intervention in other countries for markets, raw materials cheap labor and 'favorable' marketting conditions outstrip street crime by orders of magnitude; multiple the number of murders committed by street thugs by 1000 and the magnitude of theft by 10,000 and one get some idea of how well done corporate criminals do their crime.

G. Motives for Corporate Crime in Advanced Monopoly Societies. The sources of corporate crime mirror the areas in which corporations had free reign in earlier, pre/semi-democratic political systems.

1. Taxation. As the costs of keeping the underclass docile, more and more taxes are needed. As the costs of maintaining a false peace in other countries increase, taxes for military goods increase. As the state absorbs costs of reproducing labor and capital in high-tech societies, tax burdens increase.

At some point, increase in tax rates pass critical values and create problems for capitalist in competing for capital in the stock market and in competing for markets in the global economic system.

2. Environmental Laws. As long as only workers, minorities and the poor are adversely affected by pollution, the democratic state does little to control it...when middle class neigh- borhoods/amenities are affected, legislators respond and, again, profits and investment capital is threatened. The more costs of environment safeguards absorbed by corporations, the more reason to violate such laws.

3. Job Security/fringe benefits. Job security threatens profits since workers with seniority get higher wages and more benefits. The benefits themselves add 30, 50, 70% to the costs of labor. When the state begins to intervene on behalf of workers with legal enactments, corporate executives try to absorb costs; when markets and investment capital markets are threatened, they begin to violate labor law.

Minimum wage laws are a particular problem when the economy is globalized; local corporations compete with goods made by workers not protected by those same 'friendly' governments abroad.

4. Anti-monopoly laws. It is a dilemma for the capitalist state; capitalism as a system requires competition; particular firms require market growth and security. As democracy expands to include more and more consumers, law-makers pass laws which restrict monopoly practices.

This results in bribery, purchase of the political process, movement of investment overseas and/or secrecy in price fixing.

G. Solutions to Corporate Crime. There are many factors to consider when thinking about how to minimize corporate crime.

1. How to retain the more positive features of capitalism: flexibility, innovation, productivity, improvement of knowledge processes, unconcern for ancient structures of privilege and power.

2. How to extend agency to those exluded from the political process by the costs/economics of participation.

3. How to extend benefits to workers, underclass, third-world rather than only/primarily to stock-owners/favored employees.

4. How to control advertizing such that human consciousness remains oriented first of larger human values more so than privatized consumption.

5. How to fit production of essential goods into continuously declining resources.

6. How to insulate the political process from existing inequalites in wealth and power.

H. These and more problems await affirmative postmodern criminology as we move into the 21st century. Criminology has made a lot of progress since the days we talked of instincts, body types, physiological/chemical causes of crime...yet there is much, much more to be done. I have a few answers and the beginnings of others...along with Louk Hulsman, Ron Kramer, Dragan Milovanovic, Richard Quinney, Ray Michalowski, The Schwendingers, Tony Platt and a hunderd other radical, feminist, marxist, postmodern criminologists.

TR Young