A great paradox embodies the relationship between human rights and labor rights in the world today. Institutional trade unionism is not doing so well. This is most obvious in Anglo-America, where union density has declined dramatically during the last quarter century, and where unionism's influence, under both Labour and Democratic Party Administrations has been less than potent. With some notable exceptions - South Africa, South Korea, Brazil – one can say the same for union membership and power all over the world. According to the International Labor Organization's World Labor Report, trade union membership dropped sharply during the 1990s, falling to less than 20 percent of workers in 48 out of 92 countries. The decline was most serious in manufacturing, even thought, on a world-wide basis, the manufacture of actual things in actual factories was a booming proposition.[1]

            But in this globalized production system, the connections between employers and employees has become increasingly attenuated. Whereas employees used to work for an identifiable common employer, today they occupy an uncertain location on a global production and distribution chain. Indeed, globalization has shifted much production and employment beyond the reach of the labor law of any single country, and it has blurred the meaning of the employment relationship, both in the nation which hosts the corporate headquarters and in the country where supplier firms are located. World auto production is today near record levels, but the number of workers, in the U.S, Japan, and in Europe, who work directly for the great auto multinationals, has been reduced by 50 percent over the last quarter century. In the United States the big domestic auto companies no longer care all that much about the wages they negotiate for currently employed union workers; the real issues are decentralization, out sourcing, and the flexibility of their supply chains. 

            This eclipse of trade unionism is not just one of declining numbers, bargaining leverage, and political clout. It has had a moral and ideological dimension as well. The effort to find some international mechanism that will defend trade unionism in a globalized economy has proven painfully slow and difficult, but this is not simply a question of capitalist power and prerogative. It reflects in addition a decline in the legitimacy and authority of unionism as an institution capable of defending the interests of ordinary people around the globe. Trade unions are too often considered defenders of the status quo; they are complicit in the maintenance of gender and racial hierarchies that are anathema in the global North. And in the global South, those unions that actually do exist often seem an entrenched aristocracy. Thus in South Africa a showdown may well be in the offing between the leftwing unions, who are nevertheless representative of a strata of relatively well-off workers, and the African National Congress which is desperate for export earnings and development funds.

            All this may well be contrasted, even causally related, to the remarkable growth that has taken place during the last quarter century in the moral authority and sheer political potency of the movement for international human rights. War criminals are being tried in the Hague, the rights of women have been put on the social and political agenda even in the Middle East, and the defense of minority ethnic rights has achieved a legitimacy not seen since Woodrow Wilson injected "self-determination" into the diplomatic lexicon some 80 years ago.  At no time since 1948, when Eleanor Roosevelt presided over the negotiations that gave birth to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has that document been held in higher regard. Even the most abusive governments pay lip service to its principles. All of the major industrial nations, except for the U.S. and China - admittedly big exceptions - have ratified the ILO conventions that assert "freedom of assembly" as a fundamental human right. Even the U.S. government endorses the key ILO conventions, if not for itself than for everyone else. So as a condition for lifting its trade embargo against Cuba, U.S. law requires that island nation to put in place a transition regime "allowing the establishment of independent trade unions as set forth in Conventions 87 and 98 of the ILO."[2]

    This world-wide endorsement of the human rights idea has become the charter for a new kind of statecraft, even a new kind of globalized civil society. Thousands of Non Governmental Organizations make it their business to expose human rights violations and push forward a social, economic, and legal framework to which sovereign states must accommodate themselves. There may well be as many as 25,000 international NGO's in the world today; some 2,500 are recognized by the UN. Not all are concerned with human rights, but many of the most important and high profile take this portfolio as their primary mission. Amnesty International, for example, has more than a million members world-wide and it has affiliates or networks in over 90 countries and territories. Its London-based International Secretariat has a staff of over 300 which caries out research, coordinates worldwide lobbying and maintains an impressive presence at many international conferences and institutions. Human Rights Watch went from a budget of $200,000 in 1979 to $20 million in 2001. Two years ago HRW published Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States Under Human Rights Standards," which is certainly one of the most devastating accounts of the hypocrisy and injustice under which trade unionists labor in one portion of North America. Like the world's first human rights NGO - the Anti-Slavery Society that helped abolish legal servitude within the British Empire - such international organizations command a legitimacy greater than that of many national governments. UN Secretary Kofi Annan has called these voluntary international organizations "the conscious of humanity."[3]

This new sensitivity to global human rights is undoubtedly a good thing for the cause of trade unionism, rights at work, and the democratic impulse. A symbiotic relationship clearly exists between a resolution of the two-century old "labor question" and the advancement of democratic norms and human rights standards.

            A manifestation of this relationship and of the legitimacy won by rights issues is found in the effort, largely motivated by activists in North America and Western Europe, to hold corporations directly accountable for their environmental, labor, and human rights conduct. This began in the 1970s when organizations like Greenpeace campaigned for ecologically-sound whaling and fishing practices, but today it extends to the full range of corporate behavior, of which labor standards and labor rights are a prominent element. In the anti-sweatshop movement and in the world-wide fight against child labor, slavery and the subjection of women, a defacto alliance now exists between numerous NGOs and several of the more progressive trade unions in North America and Europe, with some support from struggling worker organizations in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Putting aside for a moment any consideration of the effectiveness of this alliance, or its impact on corporate policy, these movement oriented advocacy groups have achieved a high-profile potency. Indeed, if hypocracy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then we must nevertheless marvel at the corporate tribute that has been extracted.

At latest count, some 182 labor and human rights codes of conduct have been put in place by transnational organizations, Corporations, industry associations and stakeholder groups. A  variety of codes have entered the public-policy marketplace: These are sponsored by nongovernmental organizations like the Fair Labor Association, the Workers Rights Consortium, the Ethical Trading Initiative, the Clean Clothes Campaign, the Rugmark Foundation, the Foulball Campaign and Social Accountability 8000. At a time when most corporations and many politicians are rethinking and devaluing the idea of a society-wide labor-management social compact, or even of a more limited collective bargaining agreement, members of these worker rights consortia include company officials, trade unionists, human rights activists, religious leaders, student groups, and university administrators. Corporations have entered into these agreements because they fear adverse public relations and consumer boycotts; but we should not simply dismiss such a stratagem as risk avoidance. It says a lot when these multinationals recognize that human rights activists actually stand a chance of persuading millions of consumers that they should shun products produced under conditions where elementary labor standards and human rights are violated. Whatever their actual impact on third world labor rights, these corporate codes of conduct undermine, even contradict, the neo-liberal globalizers who have heretofore conflated a free market in labor and goods with the capitalist utopianism that has flourished in the years after the end of the Cold War. [4]

Take Reebok International, for example. Reebok, which positions itself as the rights conscious shoemaking multinational, first advertised this aspect of its corporate culture when in 1988 it underwrote an Amnesty International concert tour designed to bring awareness of human rights issues to young people. Reebok executives advertise their adherence to a corporate code of conduct "based on the core principles" expressed in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it markets soccer balls and other sports ware with labels that assure consumers, "Guaranteed: Manufactured without child Labor." The company even awards a "Reebok Human Rights Award" to activists who fight against child labor and repressive dictatorships.[5]

            To gain some insight into the future of the relationship between human rights, workers' rights, and the fate of trade unionism, one might be well served to look at the history of workrights in the United States. In no other large country is rights onsciousness of greater potency, in the law, in culture, in foreign policy, in the subtleties of daily life and language. Since the 1960s a multicultural, gender-sensitive rights culture has been institutionalized, legitimized, and codified within the major corporations, inside the governmental bureaucracies, in academia, and all across the political spectrum. But during the same years that this rights culture became hegemonic, the labor movement, as idea, ideology, and institution, moved well into the imaginative shadows. In no other large nation, aside from those which are outright dictatorships, has unionism lost so many members and so much political and economic leverage. Despite the ascendance of a new progressive leadership at the AFL-CIO and in key unions, and despite the recruitment of thousands of energetic new organizers, the U.S. remains politically and legally hostile terrain for the revival of trade unionism, regardless of its structure, leadership, industry, or demographic composition. As the Human Rights Watch report Unfair Advantage, points out in such graphic detail, "millions of workers are excluded from coverage by laws to protect rights of organizing, bargaining, and striking...recourse for labor rights violations is often delayed to a point where it ceases to provide redress. Remedies are weak and often ineffective. In a system replete with all the appearance of legality and due process, workers' exercise of rights to organize, to bargain, and to strike... has been frustrated by many employers who realize they have little to fear from labor law enforcement..."[6]

The dichotomy between U.S. rights-culture and trade unionism is graphically apparent when we consider the recent fate of two groups of low-wage, service-economy workers engaged in conflict with their employer. Most were Hispanic or African-American, and both groups of workers endured the kind of arduous, inequitable work lives that had once given moral urgency to the movements for both trade unionism and racial justice. During the 1980s Shoney's Restaurants still did business in the Jim Crow spirit that had shaped the racial mentality of founder Ray Danner when he opened his first Nashville Big Boy decades before. More than two-thirds of all African-American workers were confined to the kitchen. When Danner found a restaurant in which the dining room staff was too "dark," he ordered the managers to dismiss the blacks and "lighten" it up. All this was embarrassing and increasingly unprofitable, so in 1992 the NAACP had little real difficulty in winning an extraordinary $132 million settlement against Shoney's. Danner was forced to pay nearly half out of his own pocket, and when Wall Street got wind that he might still control the company, its stock plunged and the Shoney's board kicked him out of the company. Thousands of African-American workers took home sizable checks, while Shoney's instituted de facto hiring and promotion quotas designed to rectify the situation. "Our goal is to set human resource standards standards to which other companies aspire," boasted a company spokeswomen.

But compare all this with what happened to the Latino women who worked for Sprint Corporation's La Conexion Familiar in San Francisco. In the low-wage world of telecommunications Taylorism, their dignity was under constant assault. By 1994 most had joined the Communications Workers of America, but just before the NLRB election Sprint shut down La Conexion and laid off all the employees. After CWA protest the NLRB slapped the company with more than 50 different labor law violations, including bribes, threats, and firing workers in direct response to the union organizing campaign. The government agency ordered Sprint to rehire the workers and pay them back wages, perhaps as much as $12 million.

But nothing happened. In contrast to the shaming and redemption through which Shoney's passed, Sprint executives felt no cause for alarm. They successfully lobbied the Clinton Administration for various favors, reiterated their hard-line opposition to trade unions, and got a federal appeals court to throw out the adverse NLRB order. The company even codified its tactics in a "Union-Free Management Guide," declaring that of the "myriad of challenges" faced by Sprint, paramount "is the threat of union intervention in our business." Since neither Wall Street jitters, public approbation, nor government pressure held much of a threat, Sprint and most other U.S. firms were quite happy to skirt the law to get rid of union activists and intimidate workers.[7]

So how do we explain this combination: a powerful, pervasive culture of rights coexisting with a vicious anti-union praxis? We can win some perspective by reexamining, during the first half of the twentieth century, the very different relationship that linked institutional trade unionism and the defense of individual rights, both on the job and off. The United States has never had a powerful socialist tradition, but core ideas of that impulse have often been carried forward by the union movement. This was especially true during the Great Depression when two near-hegemonic ideas made the emergence of a mass labor movement resonate with many of the most embedded democratic aspirations of American republicanism.

First, in the depths of the Great Depression, trade unionism promised to police the anarchic competition of the market and push forward a Keynesian revival of an economy. For more than a third of a century, from about 1933 until the early 1970s, a highly politicized system of industry-wide collective bargaining generated something resembling the more formal corporatist frameworks that were reestablished in Europe after the end of the Second World War. In the U.S. however, this macro-economic function, the role played by unions as Keynesian stabilizer within an inherently unstable capitalism, was not enough to legitimize mass unionism, among either political elites or the mass of American workers. Hence the second great rationale for the state-assisted rebirth of unionism during the Great Depression: "industrial democracy," or the formal, legal insertion of a rights regime within the world of work.

Arguing for the 1935 labor law that would bear his name, Senator Robert Wagner asserted, "industrial tyranny is incompatible with a Republican form of government." Unionism would bring to the shop and office floor those procedures and standards that had long been venerated in the courts, the legislatures, and at the ballot box. Collective bargaining wrote Sumner Slichter, then the dean of American labor economists, is a method of "introducing civil rights into industry, that is, of requiring that management be conducted by rule rather than by arbitrary decision." And a 1941 union handbook, How to Win for the Union?, confidentially asserted, "The contract is your constitution, and the settlements of grievances under it are the decisions of an industrial supreme court." On the shop floor industrial democrats envisioned an "industrial jurisprudence," a constitutionalization of factory government, and the growth of a two-party system that put unions and managers on an equal footing. The responsibilities and expectations of American citizenship - due process, free speech, the right of assembly and petition - would now find their place in factory, mill, and office. A civil society would be constructed within the very womb of the privately held enterprise. For millions of workers, a majority immigrants or the offspring of immigrants from Europe and the American South, trade unionism was the only road to civil rights, civil liberties, and real citizenship.[8] 

            But ideological and political support for this system collapsed even before union strength began its precipitous decline in the 1970s. Before the impact of global competition, before deindustrialization of the old mass production sector, and even before the emergence of a militant brand of anti-unionism within large sections of the political establishment, the American trade union movement came under fierce ideological attack. The Cold War had made suspect the whole discourse of "industrial democracy," but unionism's devaluation was not merely a product of conservative assault or McCarthyite invective. By the end of the 1950s many of America's most famous intellectuals, both radical and liberal, were backing away from their allegiance to the unions, or even to the idea of a working-class organized to advance its own self interest. Radicals like C. Wright Mills thought the unions "the most effective tool for the incorporation of the working class in a system of oppression and imperialism."  John Kenneth Galbraith and other mid-century liberals thought unionism a handmaiden to a benign, corporate "technostructure."[9] 

            Most intellectuals and policy-makers came to see the whole system of collective bargaining as at best a pillar of the status quo, a system of incremental social advance that actually sustained a liberal variant of American capitalism. In the early Cold War era this had seemed quite a virtue, which the Voice of America celebrated in those nations where socialist ideals still dichotomized social conflict. Reinhold Neibuhr, America's foremost theologian, and a minister who had once denounced Henry Ford from a Detroit pulpit, summed up this conventional wisdom at the end of the 1950s. "The equilibrium of power achieved between management and labor…is one of the instruments used by a highly technical society, with ever larger aggregates of power, to achieve that tolerable justice which has rendered Western Civilization immune to the Communist virus."[10] 

            This was pretty thin gruel, especially in an era when the civil rights movement and the New Left were measuring all social initiatives by a democratic standard of far more robust character. Indeed, the rise of a dynamic, morally incisive civil rights movement ratified a great shift in progressive American consciousness. During those dramatic years in the early 1960s when demonstrations and marches led by Martin Luther King and other militants pushed civil rights to the top of the social agenda, the entire discourse of American liberalism shifted decisively out of the New Deal-labor orbit and into a world in which the racial divide colored all politics. From the early 1960s onward, the most legitimate, and in many instances the most potent, defense of American job rights would be found not through collective initiative, as codified in the Wagner Act and advanced through the trade unions, but through an individual’s claim to his or her civil rights based on race, gender, age, or other attribute. If a new set of work rights was to be won, the decisive battles would take place, not in the union hall or across the bargaining table, but in the legislative chambers and in the courts.      

            The United States has been a world-wide pioneer in the promulgation of workplace rights encompassing the gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, and parenthood of employees. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act therefore stands with the 1935 Wagner Act as a pillar upon which the world of work has been reshaped. Indeed, while the American labor law has become increasingly dysfunctional, Title VII, which bans workplace discrimination, opened the floodgates to a series of new laws, labeled "civil rights," which proved central to the expansion of work rights within the realm of factory, office, school, and salesroom. The list of such legislation is quite remarkable. In 1968 came the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, in 1969 the Mine Safety Act, in 1970 the Occupational Safety and Health Act, in 1973 the Rehabilitation Act, and in 1978 the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. More recently the two most important pieces of "labor legislation" in the United States have been the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Legislation protecting people of differing sexual orientation has either been passed or is being debated in many states. A European trade unionist might observe that such social legislation merely enabled the U.S. to catch up with some of the welfare state safeguards long present in Western Europe. That's true, because this recent advance in social legislation arises not out of the potency of the American labor-left, which has been in retreat, but relied instead on the enormous political legitimacy amassed by the civil rights movement and its many rights-conscious heirs.

            Organized labor stood on the winning side when this social legislation made it into the statute books, but in the years since 1970 American unions have been unable to make the rights revolution work for them. In health care employment, in California agriculture, in the teaching professions, and in some service trades the civil rights impulse did merge with and advance the union cause. But for most of U.S. labor, especially that centered in the private sector, rights-consciousness, which has revolutionized race and gender relations, has had little organizational payoff. Indeed, if one just looks at the timing and the numbers, an inverse relationship may well link the decline of unionism and rise of 1960s-1970s rights-consciousness.

            When we look at the way the American labor law has functioned, the problems become clear. Rights are universal and individual, which means that employers and individual members of management enjoy them just as much as workers. Under a regime of rights, it becomes very difficult to privilege a trade union as an institution that stands apart and above that of its membership. Take the issue of free speech for example. Under the original Wagner Act, there was no such thing as employer free speech. The existence of a trade union was entirely dependent upon employee choice, facilitated and protected by the federal government. But U.S. employers soon claimed that under any such regime, their constitutional rights of free speech were being abridged. In the 1930s and 1940s unions and the National Labor Relations Board (created by the Wagner Act) tried to argue that employer speech in union election contests was tantamount to intimidation or coercion. But this understanding of the social and psychological potency of employer speech was soon cast aside; Congress and the courts proved sympathetic to the management claim that in any union certification election their voice could not be silenced. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act codified this claim and American courts have proven highly sympathetic to the protection of this management "right." In the contemporary American workplace, employers use their free speech rights to hire psychologically sophisticated anti-union consultants, organize pro-company employee groups, hold mandatory captive audience meetings, tell workers that the factory will close or wages will decrease if they vote for a union, and spend millions of dollars on all sorts of anti-union propaganda.[11]

            As deployed in American law and political culture, a discourse of rights has also subverted the very idea, and the institutional expression, of union solidarity. This is because solidarity is not just a song or a sentiment, but requires a measure of coercion that can enforce the social bond when not all members of the organization - or the picket line - are in full agreement. Unions are combat organizations, and solidarity is not just another word for majority rule, especially when their existence is at stake. Thus, in recent decades, employer anti-unionism has become increasingly oriented toward the ostensible protection of the individual rights of workers as against undemocratic unions and restrictive contracts that hamper the free choice of employees. A national Right-to-Work Committee, initially funded by Southern textile interests, specializes in making use of the new rights language, civil libertarian if not actually that of the civil rights movement, in order to perforate union solidarity and discredit the union idea. The Right-To-Work Committee has therefore declared the NAACP "prostituted" when that organization aligned itself with the AFL-CIO legislative agenda. Because of its "marriage of convenience to monopolistic labor unions," asserted a Committee official, the NAACP's "first priority goes not to restricting union racial discrimination, but to striking down all state laws against compulsory unionism."[12]

A further counterposition between the "rights" of workers and the potency of the union idea has arisen out a series of judicial decisions that privilege an extremely individualistic conception of worker rights. A distinction between the economic and political rights of an individual worker came to seem more natural in the United States with the devaluation of collective bargaining and the rise of civil rights and civil liberties consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s. As early as 1961, Hugo Black, one of the Supreme Court's most aggressive civil libertarians, argued that any attempt to make a dissenting unionist contribute to the political funds of his organization was "extortion" that the government had "no…power to enforce." Today, right-wing, anti-union forces take this species of rights liberalism and throw it back at labor in an effort to strip unions of any right to used employee dues money to endorse political candidates, mobilize their membership for a particular cause, or lobby Congress or the state legislatures. In California the unions had to spend upwards of $30 million to defeat a ballot proposition that would have virtually stripped unions of their capacity to mobilize membership dues on behalf of a unified political program.[13]

Given the evolution of the rights discourse in the U.S. it is not surprising that that courts have begun to question the meaning of industrial solidarity itself, even in crucial strike situations. For example, the Supreme Court has held that workers have the right to resign their membership in the midst of a strike and then scab on their work mates free from the disciplinary penalties sought by their former union associates. "When there is a lawful dissolution of a union-member relation, the union has no more control over the former member than it has over the man in the street." Here the Supreme Court, once again led by its most liberal members, subverted the legal and ethical basis of collective solidarity, transforming this ancient union impulse into a coercive set of legal/administrative pressures that merely trampled on the work rights of the individual ex-unionist, which was not far distant from the views promulgated by the anti-union right.[14]

            Thus, the same species of rights conscious liberalism that abolished racial segregation, ended McCarthyism, and legalized women's right has also undermined the legal basis of union power and turned solidarity into a quaint and antique notion. One might respond to this eclipse of the American trade unions and to the devolution of collective bargaining, by arguing that the protective functions these institutions once embodied are being taken over by an elaborate set of new agencies, new laws and new advocates. If workers are protected against sexual harassment by a lawyer rather than their union shop steward, the employee’s rights are protected nonetheless; and if the laws governing occupational safety and health regulate the work environment rather than a union contract clause, the factory air will smell just as sweet.

            But acute problems arise, both in the United States and on a world-wide scale, in the substitution of a rights-based model of social regulation for one based on the collective advancement of mutual interests. The first is that of enforcement. The legal-regulatory system itself is simply not capable of enforcing by administrative order the inner life of millions of workplaces. As anti-sweatshop and human rights advocates are now rediscovering, no consistent regulation is really possible without hearing from the workers themselves, and their voice will remain silent unless they have some institution that protects them from the consequences of speaking up. Indeed the whole history of social regulation in the industrialized West has shown that no army of government inspectors can ensure management compliance without benefit of systematic, organized pressure at the work site itself. In the United States few workers, indeed few citizens, have the resources or expertise to advance their own particularistic rights claim. It requires an organization – the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO – to vitalize these rights and insure that all enjoy them.

 Second, the spread of employee rights has suffered through its necessary dependence upon professional, governmental expertise. No matter how well constructed, such regulation takes disputes out of the hands of those directly involved, furthers the influence of administrative professionals, sets up these experts as the target of everyone's resentment, and ends by increasing litigiousness and undermining government legitimacy. Rights consciousness therefore transfers authority into the hands of another body - a court, a panel, a government agency - to sort out the various claims and strike the approximate balance. Justice is served, but not always democratic participation.

            Third, the rights discourse has had virtually no impact on the structure of industry or employment, in either the U.S. or abroad. A rights-based approach to the democratization of the workplace fails to confront capital with demands that cannot be defined as a judicially protected mandate. In the United States workers have used the new work rights that emerged out of the civil rights movement to democratize gender and racial hierarchies, only to see their real security and opportunities undermined by the dramatic transformation of a working environment over which they have had little control.

            And finally, the rights revolution has not generated conditions which produce strong unions, or tempered capital's prerogatives, despite the linkages that have historically existed between these worlds. In the American textile industry, for example, where civil rights laws smashed Jim Crow, the rights revolution could not actually transform the character of managerial authority, advance the level of trade unionism, or forestall the massive deindustrialization that began in the 1970s.

            If global trade unionism is to avoid the fate that has befallen it in the United States, if it is to flourish in a world that privileges human rights, then two things are necessary. First, the unions must themselves champion the rights impulse so that it does not become the presumptive property of the corporations, the free marketeers, or even the human rights NGOs.  To flourish again trade unionism does require civil rights and human rights and their vigorous enforcement in every global workplace. We should not sneer at the ILO conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. But this is not enough, for as the U.S. example demonstrates, without a bold and society-shaping political and social program, human rights can devolve into something approximating libertarian individualism.

            The task before us is to reforge the ideological and practical links that once made the world-wide fight against an atomization of society the natural product of the fight for political equality, civil liberties, and the liberation of those once excluded from full citizenship. Both T. H. Marshal and Martin Luther King thought that the hierarchy of rights was both politically expansive and morally indivisible, that a set of “social” rights involving a minimal standard of living, adequate shelter, educational opportunity, and full employment flowed organically out of the struggle for those citizenship rights usually thought to be of a more ancient lineage. Indeed, the long-neglected Articles 23, 24 and 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have a definite New Deal flavor, asserting the right to “social security,” to “just and favourable remuneration,” to “form and join trade unions,” to enjoy “periodic holidays with pay,” and to a “standard of living adequate for …health and well-being…including the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age” etc.[15]

            But as UDHR framer Eleanor Roosevelt recognized, the social rights so hopefully enumerated in 1948 were far from self-enforcing. In the name of free-market efficiency, contemporary managers and ministers seek to commodify those few social rights that have won a measure of transnational legitimacy. Not only are pension and public education rights on the privatization agenda, but corporations today seek to transform drinkable water and breathable air into fungible products subject to a market valuation. It is clear therefore that social rights will always be contested, because their provision requires a recognition that society, contra Margaret Thatcher’s infamous belief, is not in fact an assemblage of atomistic individuals functioning according to the dictates of the market. Social rights, like so many of their civil libertarian sisters, cannot be guaranteed by administrative fiat or judicial opinion, because such rights almost always involve a measure of economic redistribution, collective empowerment, and social vision. Like the Congress of Industrial Unions in 1930s America, like British Labour in 1945, like the South African unions in the epoch of Apartheid, and like Solidarity in the 1980s, the moral and institutional renewal of the labor movement becomes possible when the an organic linkage between individual rights and a transformative political purpose is reestablished.

Notes:

¹ILO, World Labour Report, 1997-98 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1997), p. 4-8, http://www.ilo.org

²K.D. Ewing, “Human Rights and Industrial Relations: Possibilities and Pitfalls,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 40:1  (March 2002)

³James A. Paul,  “NGOs and Global Policy-Making,”  June 2000, Global Policy Forum, http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/analysis/ana100.htm

⁴Lance Compa, “Wary Allies: Trade Unions, NGOs, and Corporate Codes of Conduct,” The American Prospect, 12, (July 2, 2001), 8-12; Debora Spar, “The Spotlight on the Bottom Line: How Multinationals Export Human Rights,” Foreign Affairs 77 (March-April 1998), 7-13.

⁵Doug Cahn and Tara Holeman, “Business and Human Rights,” Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy 14 (Spring 1999), 52-58. Cahn and Holeman are executives at Reebok.

⁶Human Rights Watch, Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Assoication in the United States under International Human Rights Standards  (Washington: human Rights Watch, 2000), 6.

⁷The Shoney-Sprint example above is taken from Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 178-80.

⁸Ibid., 25-38, 59-60.

⁹C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 318; John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 274.

¹⁰Reinhold Niebuhr, “ ‘End of an Era’ for Organized Labor,” New Leader, (January 4, 1960), 18.

¹¹David Brody, Labour Rights as Human Rights: A Reality Check,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 39:4 December 2001, pp. 601-695.

¹²Reed Larson, “Is Monopoly in the American Tradition?” Vital Speeches of the Day 39 (June 15, 1973), 527-28.

¹³Reuel Schiller, “From Group Rights to Individual Liberties: Post-War Labor Law, Liberalism, and the Waning of Union Strength,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 20  (1999), 328-30.

¹⁴David Abraham, “Individual Autonomy and Collective Empowerment in Labor Law: Union Membership Resignations and Strikebreaking in the New Economy,” New York University Law Review  63  (December 1988), 1281,  1314-23.

¹⁵Universal Declaration of Human Rights is found on the United Nations web page at http://ww.un.org/overview/rights.html. During the Cold War, the United States found this enumeration of social rights and embarrassment, because the Soviets claimed that while these articles were respected in the Eastern bloc, they were willfully ignored in the West and in the client states of Latin America and Asia.