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  • Equality, Sufficiency, and the Labor Question in the Age of Human Rights
  • Joseph A. McCartin (bio)

At the outset it is important to note that Samuel Moyn’s thoughtfully provocative book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, is not much concerned with the connection between workers’ rights and human rights. Labor rights per se are only mentioned a few times in the course of Moyn’s argument. They are not central to his thinking. Even so, his book contains a range of insights of profound import for all who care about the recent past and possible future of workers.

Two insights stand out. The first involves the complex relationship Moyn describes between human rights and neoliberalism or “market fundamentalism,” terms he alternately employs to describe the political economy that arose in the last decades of the twentieth century. He does not blame rising inequality on the ascendancy of rights consciousness. “Conspiratorial accounts that view human rights as a dastardly accomplice of shifts in the global political economy are unconvincing,” he concludes. The “real trouble about human rights when correlated with market fundamentalism,” he says, is “not that they promote it but that they are unambitious in theory and ineffectual in practice in the face of market fundamentalism’s success” (216). So while human rights discourse did not itself encourage the rise of neoliberalism, it nonetheless became “the companion of market fundamentalism” (216) — a “market fundamentalist Doppelgänger” (218). Appeals to human rights proved nearly useless to those who worried about rising inequality or suffered from the increasing insecurity that the new political economy introduced into the lives of wage earners.

The second insight flows from his observation that the rise of human rights to the status of a “moral lingua franca in international affairs” coincided with an explosion of material inequality. “Before the age of human rights came, dreams of equality were taken quite seriously, both nationally and globally,” Moyn argues. Yet, as he goes on to demonstrate with abundant evidence and acute analysis, the rise of human rights abetted a shift — both worldwide and within developed and developing nations alike — from aspirations to achieve greater equality to vastly more modest dreams of sufficiency, a desire for “some minimum provision of the good things in life” (3). [End Page 107]

Both insights shed light on organized labor’s deepening crisis and the predicament that so many workers wrestle with today. Consider the connection between human rights and market fundamentalism that Moyn develops. More than fifteen years ago Nelson Lichtenstein argued that “if one just looks at the timing and the numbers, an inverse relationship may well link the decline of unionism and rise of . . . rights-consciousness.”1 If anything, that inverse relationship seems more evident today than when Lichtenstein wrote. For more than a generation, unions and their supporters bent their appeals in the direction of the ascendant human rights discourse: they argued that “workers’ rights are human rights,” suggested that union organizing be made a civil right, and supported the Employee Free Choice Act, whose main arguments were predicated on the freedom of association.2 Yet the more they aligned their cause with that of human rights, the more they discovered that alignment to be “ineffectual in practice,” to borrow Moyn’s phrase.

Not only did union strength trend down across the developed world while the human rights framework gained legitimacy; unionists also saw such human rights as freedom of speech and assembly turned into a battering ram against them. Witness the US Supreme Court’s June 2018 decision in the case of Janus v. AFSCME. In it, the court accomplished a 180-degree turn in its jurisprudence, overturning a precedent firmly established in the 1970s — a period when, in Moyn’s telling, human rights was just beginning to break through to the status of global moral lingua franca. Citing the First Amendment, in Janus the Court decided that unions had no right to collect representation fees from the state and local government workers on whose behalf they bargained lest they infringe those workers’ rights to be free of association with a union.

Such battering continues. Cases challenging the constitutional basis of unions’ right to exclusive...

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