ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on state crimes against labor, meaning the working class. The state's precarious responsibilities in capitalist societies, in part, explain its seemingly contradictory behavior, for it fulfills divergent functions—accumulation and legitimation. State-corporate crime is a more recent type of crime that is allowed, tolerated, and abetted by the state. State-corporate crime has been defined specifically as "illegal or socially injurious actions that result from a mutually reinforcing interaction between policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more institutions of political governance and economic production and distribution". Right-to-work laws, emanating from recent conservative political dominance found in North America and Western Europe, are official state policies designed to limit the power and membership of labor collectives. The state itself engages in other economic crimes against labor by regulating some wages, guaranteeing laborers for the market, and preventing industrial disorder and unrest.
