Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy by Susan L. Kang (review)

In this book Susan Kang raises an issue that receives insufficient attention in the human rights literature. That is the rights of trade unions to represent the interests of workers in terms of wages, working conditions, and benefits. To quote Kang, her aim is to “investigate to what extent trade unions can use trade union rights norms to defend their interests.”

The method that Kang adopts is “process tracing.” Kang undertakes three case studies in South Korea, Great Britain, and the Canadian province of British Columbia in an attempt to trace the mechanisms that are available to trade unions to get their governments to respect international norms that relate to the collective representational rights of trade unions. She thus compares domestic executive, legislative, and judicial mechanisms used by these governments, and the appeals to international legal and normative agreements and adjudicative bodies used by unions, as they contest over trade union rights.

While the combination of international texts and bodies varies case by case, the four textual, or treaty, sources are: the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the European Social Charter (CESC), and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The sites of adjudication, the combination of which also vary case by case, were the Employment, Labour, and Social Affairs Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Committee on Freedom of Association of the ILO, the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations of the ILO, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of the United Nations.

In the Korean case, while there were paper guarantees of labor rights under the dictatorship that lasted until 1987, there were no effective ways for the practice of these rights unless the government consented. Those who tried were harshly repressed. After the 1987 liberalization, trade unionists demanded respect for union rights. The ILO conventions and the ILO’s Committee on Freedom of Association, as well as the OECD, became important reference and adjudicative sources to which advocates of union rights could appeal. The major issues included the right to strike, the banning of solidarity activity for workers who were striking, the refusal to allow unions other than the state-supported ones to form, and the withholding of trade union rights for teachers and civil servants. Despite what has been called “the liberalization,” the government continued to manifest authoritarian tendencies and to suspect organizing efforts and support activities as being politically subversive and a threat to economic growth. The government thus enacted an “obstruction of business” law to prosecute union activists and their supporters. While the government did make some concessions based on ILO norms (e.g., teachers and civil servants were given the right to form unions), it was less willing to grant the workers in the private sector their full right to strike.

The British case presents a very different history. There was not a division of the country between communist and capitalist, and no recent history of dictatorship. The post-World War II governments were led by the Labour Party, of which the most numerous component was the Trades Union Congress. But even under the Labour Party’s governance there were numerous strikes, especially in the public sectors like coal and transport. The backlash hurt the Labour Party and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came into the prime ministership with a program of privatization to break the power of the unions. She argued that the program was necessary for economic efficiency and growth. The Thatcher government introduced the right of employers to engage their employees in one-to-one contracts that gave those workers better wages than they would have gotten through union negotiations. This maneuver was a clear attempt to break union solidarity. Nevertheless, in 1992 it received the backing of the British courts, which...