The Price of a Death White-Collar Crime · Crime Lab 8 · Midwestern State University
In 2024, 5,070 people were killed at work in the United States, about 14 a day. When a federal safety inspector investigates one of those deaths and finds the employer broke the law, the median penalty is $16,550. That number is not a fine for the death. The Occupational Safety and Health Act does not price deaths; it prices violations, and a death is evidence that a violation may have occurred. This lab works through what that means. You will see the penalty schedule, guess the penalties in six recent fatality cases before you see them, compute the price per death in the largest corporate violence cases of the last twenty years and set it against the value the same government assigns to a statistical life when it writes regulations, and then use Benson and Simpson's opportunity framework to explain why the victims of these crimes are the workers and the sanctions are the smallest in the course.
The schedule
The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 lets OSHA cite an employer for each violation of a standard and propose a civil penalty per violation, capped by statute and adjusted for inflation. The 2025 amounts stayed in effect for 2026 because the fall 2025 government shutdown kept the Bureau of Labor Statistics from producing the inflation figure the adjustment requires. The criminal provision has not changed since 1970 except for the general federal fine statute.
Two comparisons the AFL-CIO makes every year. Harassing a wild burro on federal land carries up to a year in prison under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act; a willful safety violation that kills a worker carries up to six months. And since the Act took effect in 1971 there have been 144 criminal prosecutions for worker deaths under it, in a period in which hundreds of thousands of workers have died on the job. Benson and Simpson report the same pattern from a New York Times review of OSHA data: 2,197 worker deaths from willful violations between 1982 and 2002, 196 referred for prosecution, about half of those convicted, a fifth of those imprisoned, so that "the likelihood that someone will be imprisoned when a worker dies as a result of a willful safety violation is less than 1 out of 100" (p. 128).
When federal OSHA investigates a worker's death and issues citations, what is the median total penalty (fiscal year 2025)?
Why the average serious violation costs $4,678 when the maximum is $16,550. OSHA reduces proposed penalties by formula. Since July 14, 2025, an employer with 25 or fewer employees gets 70 percent off (the threshold was 10 employees before), an employer with no OSHA inspection on record gets 20 percent off, an employer inspected in the last five years with no serious, willful, or failure-to-abate findings gets 20 percent off, and an employer that fixes the hazard on the spot gets 15 percent off. The Department's stated reason: "Small employers who are working in good faith to comply with complex federal laws should not face the same penalties as large employers with abundant resources." The reductions do not depend on whether anyone died.
Sources: OSHA, 2026 Annual Adjustments to OSHA Civil Penalties, memorandum of May 21, 2026, and OSHA Penalties page (osha.gov/penalties); 29 U.S.C. 666(e) and 18 U.S.C. 3571; 16 U.S.C. 1338(a) (burros); AFL-CIO, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2026 (April 27, 2026), using Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries data for 2024; U.S. Department of Labor, news release of July 14, 2025, on penalty reductions; Benson and Simpson (2009), ch. 6, p. 128, citing Barstow (2003) and Cullen et al. (2006).
Six recent fatality investigations
Each of these is a federal OSHA citation issued between May 2025 and April 2026 after a worker died, from the Department of Labor's news releases. Read what happened and the violations found, then set your guess for the total proposed penalty before you reveal it. Proposed penalties are what OSHA asks for; employers have 15 business days to contest, and contested penalties are usually settled lower. The reference gives the arithmetic: how many violations of each kind, and what the same citations would have come to at the statutory maximum.
0 of 6 revealed.
What set the price. The two employers with the largest penalties, Revoli and Taylor Farms, were cited for willful and repeat violations, which carry a maximum ten times the serious maximum and which OSHA can only cite when it can show the employer knew the rule and disregarded it or had been cited for the same thing before. The four others were cited only for serious violations, so their penalties are a count of hazards found times at most $16,550, minus reductions. A death from a single hazard at an employer with no history is the $16,550 case; that is the median on the first tab, and the Hyvac pipefitter is close to it. Two deaths at U.S. Steel's Clairton plant came to $118,214 because the inspection found seven serious violations and no willful ones. The penalty measures what the inspector could document about the employer's conduct, and the number of dead is not one of the terms.
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA news releases: Revoli Construction Co. Inc. (April 1, 2026); Taylor Farms New Jersey Inc. (November 24, 2025); Construction Labor Services Inc. (February 17, 2026); United States Steel Corp. and MPW Industrial Services Inc. (February 18, 2026); The Salvation Army, Orlando (May 30, 2025); Hyvac Inc. (March 4, 2026). Penalty amounts are as proposed at citation.
Six corporate violence cases and one government number
When the federal government decides whether a safety regulation is worth its cost, it uses a value per statistical life: the amount people are willing to pay, in aggregate, to reduce mortality risk by one expected death. The Department of Health and Human Services' central estimate for 2025 is $13.6 million, with a range of $6.3 million to $20.7 million. The cases below are the largest criminal resolutions for deaths caused by corporations in the last twenty years. For each, the criminal penalty is divided by the number of people killed. Before you look, rank your guess: which case had the highest price per death, and which the lowest?
Which of these had the lowest criminal penalty per death?
Bars: criminal penalty divided by deaths, on a logarithmic scale, so each grid line is ten times the one below. The dashed line is the HHS central value of a statistical life for 2025. Hover a bar for the figures.
Reading the chart. Only one case exceeds the value of a statistical life, and there the money was mostly not a penalty for the deaths: Deepwater Horizon's $4 billion included Clean Water Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act counts for the spill and an obstruction of Congress count. Upper Big Branch comes next at $7.2 million per miner, and its $209 million was a non-prosecution agreement whose largest parts were safety investment and a research trust. PG&E's $3.5 million was the statutory maximum for 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter under California law, which is why the district attorney and judge both noted that a corporation cannot be imprisoned. Boeing's $487.2 million criminal fine, with $243.6 million of it credited from the 2021 agreement, works out to about $1.4 million per passenger; the $444.5 million fund for families is compensation, not punishment, and the $455 million for compliance is money Boeing spends on itself. The chart uses the criminal fine. Change the denominator or the numerator and the ranking changes, which is the first point to make about any price per death: it is a choice about what to count, made by the people who write the agreement.
What Judge O'Connor said in November 2025. Boeing had been charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the FAA. The 2021 deferred prosecution agreement expired; in 2024 the company agreed to plead guilty and the judge rejected the plea; in May 2025 the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute at all in exchange for the payments above, and moved to dismiss. Judge O'Connor granted the motion on November 6, 2025, because Rule 48(a) does not let a court refuse a dismissal merely because it disagrees with the prosecutor's judgment, and wrote that the agreement "fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public." That order is your Meeting B reading. The question it leaves for the response sheet is what accountability could mean for a defendant that cannot be imprisoned, in a system where the individuals were never charged.
Sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ASPE, Standard Values for Regulatory Analysis, 2025 (February 2025); United States v. The Boeing Company, N.D. Tex., order of November 6, 2025, and Department of Justice non-prosecution agreement of May 2025, as reported by NPR (November 7, 2025) and CNBC (November 6, 2025); PG&E plea, Butte County Superior Court, June 16, 2020 (Courthouse News Service); Alpha Natural Resources non-prosecution agreement, U.S. Attorney, S.D. W. Va., December 6, 2011; United States v. BP Exploration and Production, E.D. La., plea of November 15, 2012; United States v. BP Products North America, S.D. Tex., plea of October 2007 (Texas City, $50 million Clean Air Act fine) and OSHA settlement of $87 million (2009, failure to abate). Deaths per case are as stated in the charging documents or agreements.
Why the victims are workers and the sanctions are small
Benson and Simpson's chapter applies their three properties of white-collar crime to environmental and workplace offenses: specialized access, spatial separation of offender and victim, and the superficial appearance of legitimacy. For workplace deaths they add a fourth ingredient, the built-in incentive: "For most businesses, the cost of labor has a significant impact on overall profitability. Hence, there is a built-in incentive to cut labor costs whenever possible. One way of doing this is by skimping on safety and in the process endangering workers" (p. 128). Their example is McWane, the Alabama pipe maker whose "McWane way" cut Tyler Pipe's workforce by nearly two-thirds, ran two 12-hour shifts, eliminated safety inspectors and maintenance crews, and between 1995 and 2003 recorded at least 4,600 injuries, nine deaths, and more than 400 federal safety violations, more than its six major competitors combined (pp. 128-129). Match each mechanism below to the property it illustrates.
0 of 5 matched.
Put the tabs together. The first tab showed a penalty schedule that prices violations and not deaths, a criminal provision that tops out at six months, and a reduction formula that discounts by employer size and history. The second showed that in practice the price of a death is the number of hazards an inspector can document times $16,550, unless the employer was caught knowing. The third showed that even the largest cases resolve for less per death than the government itself says a life is worth when it writes a rule. Benson and Simpson's framework explains the pattern from the offender's side: the harm is done inside legitimate production, far from the people who decide, on people who often cannot prove what happened to them, by employers who can maintain the appearance of compliance. Tombs and Whyte, your other Meeting A reading, take the argument one step further and ask whether a legal form that reliably produces this pattern, and cannot be imprisoned when it does, should exist at all.
Source: Benson, M. L., and Simpson, S. S. (2009). White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective. Routledge, ch. 6, pp. 127-131; Tombs, S., and Whyte, D. (2015). The Corporate Criminal: Why Corporations Must Be Abolished. Routledge, ch. 1.
Lab 8 response sheet
Answer the four questions below in complete sentences. Then use the button at the bottom to assemble your answers and your guesses into one block of text, and paste that text into the Lab 8 submission in D2L before you leave class. Your answers stay on this page and are not sent anywhere until you paste them.
About the figures
Penalty maximums are from OSHA's 2026 adjustment memorandum; the fatality-case figures are proposed penalties from Department of Labor news releases and may have been reduced in settlement since; the AFL-CIO figures are from the 2026 Death on the Job report, which compiles Bureau of Labor Statistics and OSHA data for 2024 and fiscal year 2025; the corporate cases are from the court records and agency releases cited on the third tab. The value of a statistical life is the HHS central estimate for 2025 in 2024 dollars.