Labour Market Criminology

Abstract

The aim of the article is to bring attention to certain aspects of the labour market which are not in themselves criminal offenses but can definitely be considered as negative. The labour market has already been studied as an arena of market games as well as a place where the rights of the employee are infringed upon. My intention was to apply concepts from criminal science to the labour market. For the purposes of the text, I adopted a broad definition of this science, viewing it as deepened reflection on the state of society, asking questions about the origins of public order and considering the social consequences of negative actions and behaviour. Scholarly works and press articles commonly employ the term ‘labour market’, but this is a misleading designation because unlike in the commodity market, here we are not talking about supply vs demand, while the price is not a key element of free market play. Moreover, the commodity market is all about exchange, the result being a change of ownership status. Meanwhile, in the labour market a special type of social relationship is established, known as employment. Unlike on the commodity market, in the labour market the ‘commodity’ itself, i.e. the person, takes part in making market decisions. To be more precise, we should say that participation in decision-making belongs to the person as the key provider of the commodity sold, i.e. work. The labour market is also an arena of purely social interactions because it is here that the employer and employee meet (also literally). Sometimes this meeting produces negative consequences for one of the parties, although more often for the employee. In this context the role of the state as a regulator that can undertake preventive measures (setting up legal and other types of standards to prevent violations) or follow-up measures (building a system of effective redress should violations occur), emerges. In my view, the complex network of such dependencies and relations as described above should be the focus of labour market criminology. To facilitate description of the social reality considered I propose to introduce a new notion, namely labour market tort. Any action on the part of a market participant that has the potential to infringe upon the rights or holdings of another participant and which endangers common goods such as public order or justice should be considered a case of such tort, as should any action that undermines the economic and social purpose of work. I also propose to develop a new instrument of criminal labour market analysis which I have tentatively called the degree of disturbance on the labour market. This degree could be measured with the number of torts on the labour market per every 100,000 employees. I would also like to propose a theoretical model of analysing violations of public order on the labour market as well as a scheme of dependence between the basic components of the phenomenology of such violations. Departing from the premise that the aim of criminal science is to describe and explain social reality, I have tried to identify areas that are prone to violations of public order on the labour market, which areas could serve to identify types of torts on the labour market. Among these are the purely economic dimension of the labour market, the rights and duties of its participants with regard to one another, the human dimension of work, i.e. work from a social perspective, and finally the so-called arrangement of market forces which determine whether we are dealing with an employee’s or employer’s market. The article also includes a review of the legal regulations pertaining to work, a brief report on pilot empirical research concerning labour market tort, an analysis of data concerning violations of employee rights and an attempt to describe the phenomenon of forced labour as one of the gravest pathologies of the contemporary labour market.