A Shameful Business: The Case for Human Rights in the American Workplace (review)

This book is an excellent example of how institutional analysis is an important supplement to class and organizational analysis of status and power. Gross documents the philosophical assumptions and policy implications of free market philosophy, and how they conflict with the very values they claim to uphold. He applies human rights-based institutional analysis to his study of worker's rights.

The author utilizes human rights principles as his standard for judgment, and contends that in doing so he can shift the terrain of the arguments about worker's rights in the United States. By re-defining worker's rights in the context of human rights, and critiquing the manner in which property rights can conflict with human rights, Gross provides a solid basis for re-examining existing U.S. labor legislation.

Nearly every chapter is grounded in historical narrative, including those on race and human rights, property rights and worker's rights, worker's freedom of association, and occupational safety and health. He also writes a fascinating history of the evolution of human resources doctrine.

Gross stresses that invidious discrimination against people of color is a form of dehumanization. Racism reflects institutionalized moral choices, which are inconsistent not only with human rights but with the professed American creed. Throughout the book, Gross makes these kinds of humanist claims. In doing so, he links oppression and dehumanization to the production of injustice. This sets the moral tone for his important claim that denial of human rights in general can be traced to the perpetuation of workplace injustice.

The book is full of useful quotations and citations from authors such as Polanyi, Carnegie, de Toqueville, du Bois, Galbraith, Holmes, King, Kozol, Mills (both), etc. Furthermore, the author makes excellent use of the humanities in his lively accounts. He also uses a wide variety of articles and books from subject specialists, but in a way which is accessible to undergraduates as well as academics.

This book provides empirically grounded accounts of specific institutionalized practices related to labor law. In doing so, it provides an excellent example of the value of understanding the relationship of class struggles and struggles for universal human values. However, Gross ignores the literature on universal human need, and at one point conflates rights with needs. Although he at first recognizes that the moral objective of justice is human welfare, he concludes that what people need is to exercise rights in order to live fully human lives. He provides a long list of what people need, but without reference to the growing body of theoretical and empirical work on human needs.

That said, one would be hard pressed to find a book that more eloquently condemns violations of human rights as crimes against humanity itself. Gross recognizes that markets are now and have always existed within an institutional context. The present institutional arrangement fails to adequately protect worker rights. Just as Jeff Noonan's Democratic Society and Human Needs has recognized that the primacy of property rights places key limitations on addressing human needs within market economies, Gross feels that human rights come up against property rights in ways that must be rectified.

Gross's strategy for social movements that promote the well-being, unity and humanity for all people relies on growing revulsion against the very moral evils he ably documents. Gross hopes that the trade union movement will adopt human rights as an explicit organizing, bargaining and legislative advocacy strategy. He envisions, for example, human rights clauses in union contracts. This would shift the terrain for arbitration and litigation. It would constrain the ability to evade key moral choices at the level of the workplace. Achieving human rights in the workplace, Gross contends, is a prerequisite for achieving social justice in society at large.