Labour Rights as Human Rights.

Elena: This review is amazingly revealing of the situation we are in and how the subject has been avoided and continues to be avoided as if the author's didn't know how to approach the subject because they would not be able to avoid denouncing the inhumanity. In a way it's the problem with many scholars: that they belong to the ruling classes and have forfeited their own humanity.  

http://www.globallawbooks.org/reviews/detail.asp?id=267

Labour Rights as Human Rights. Edited by Philip Alston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 253. £22.50.

Reviewed by Professor Sir Bob Hepple QC, FBA

 

International human rights scholars have paid relatively little attention to labour rights. This is surprising because lists of human rights include many relevant to work, such as the right to form and join trade unions, the right to free choice of employment, rights against forced and child labour, and the right to equal treatment.

 

This is one of a growing number of recent books which seek to renew the connections between workers’ rights and human rights first asserted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and in the ILO’s Declaration of Philadelphia (1944). The most recent public linkage is the ILO’s Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1998). But there lies the problem. Many critics (including Philip Alston in this and other writings) see the 1998 Declaration as a dilution of established convention rights to pious declarations, soft law and weak enforcement.

 

Five of the essays collected here focus on institutional arrangements for securing particular labour rights that are regarded as human rights. The most detailed and interesting of these is by Francis Maupain, former ILO Legal Adviser, who uses the ILO’s prolonged efforts to persuade the military dictatorship in Myanmar (Burma) to stop the use of forced labour to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of ILO supervision of human rights. Maupain is decidedly sceptical about trade-labour linkages, so one turns next to see what Steve Charnovitz has to say about such linkages in the emerging Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). On the basis of his vast practical experience he concludes that mixing trade and labour rights in a single regime can be harmful to both. He advocates different and more innovative ways of protecting labour rights, including social labelling, voluntary codes and monitoring, measures to enable workers to adjust to the impacts of free trade, and an end to bans on free association in export processing zones.

 

The essays by Patrick Macklem and Anne Davies are concerned with collective labour rights. Macklem describes the transition from ILO Conventions, aimed primarily at protecting domestic labour rights, to the inclusion of collective labour rights in international human rights instruments, although the individualistic interpretations of human rights documents do not sit easily with the collectivist ILO approach .  Davies contrasts the EU’s promotion of collective labour rights through human rights clauses in trading agreements and in its Generalised System of Preferences (GSP), with its lack of  competence to legislate on such matters within the EU and the dependence of its ‘social dialogue’ on the efficacy of collective bargaining arrangements within Member States.  Finally, Tonia Novitz gives a critical account of the gaps and weaknesses in enforcement of ILO standards by the EU

 

An essay of a quite different kind, which does not fit neatly into human rights discourse, is that by Simon Deakin. He provides a deep historical and economic analysis – bringing together ideas from his many writings on this subject –of the relationship of systems of social rights to processes of global economic development. He utilises Amaryta Sen’s ‘equality of capabilities’ approach so as to define the main function of social rights as being to provide the conditions for substantive labour market access for individuals.

 

The selective choice of topics and the varying approaches mean that taken as a whole the book does not provide any consistent answers to the question – posed at the beginning by Philp Alston – whether it is helpful or appropriate to approach labour rights as human rights. But each of the individual essays is worth reading for its own sake.