A Renewed Call for a Robust Labor and Human Rights Agenda

In his recent book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Samuel Moyn argues that the modern human rights movement has failed to challenge the neoliberal economic model and the growing economic inequality of the past decades. His thesis underscores tensions that have existed between a human rights movement that has focused mostly on addressing individual civil and political rights versus the conceptions of collective economic and social rights proposed by unions and allied labor rights organizations. While some traditional human rights organizations continue to argue that social justice remains outside their mandate, other smaller human rights organizations are shifting resources to increase their work on economic rights and strengthen transnational partnerships between human, labor, women’s, and social rights movements that challenge the current economic model and call for new economic rules that promote the well-being of workers and their families and the environment. During this time of growing inequality and the narrowing of space afforded to civil society, new tools and strategies must be developed to build bridges between the labor and human rights movements and challenge policies that undermine rights and exacerbate inequality.

In 1948 the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was signed at the United Nations, reflecting a global consensus around key political and social rights. The declaration also included an important emphasis on economic and trade union rights considered fundamental to avoiding another world war and ensuring greater economic equality.¹ Through its consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) developed its own human rights bill, which it submitted to the United Nations in 1946. Parts of the AFL’s proposed bill were reflected in the final UN Human Rights Declaration.

Despite the inclusion of worker rights in the UN Human Rights Declaration, worker and human rights struggles have traditionally occurred in separate advocacy spheres. While human rights organizations took the rights enshrined in the declaration and focused mostly on state violence such as genocide, torture, and political imprisonment, labor rights activists focused on national and local workplace struggles that dealt with economic concerns. The global workplace standards set out by the International Labor Organization played an important role in building global consensus around labor standards but did not translate into global human rights advocacy agendas and had a limited role in the context of US human and labor rights campaigns. The UN declaration outlined both economic and political and civil rights, but until the 1990s a gap remained between what was in a formal international document and how it was translated into the priorities of the human rights movement.

As Moyn points out, the human rights movement continued to struggle to develop strategies to address global justice and the increasing accumulation of wealth at the expense of workers’ well-being. In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union saw a dramatic global economic shift that brought more workers into the global economy. This change led to increased awareness by human and labor rights organizations that new strategies were needed to address a more globalized economy where capital could move freely and workers’ power was diminished by the power of global capital. The traditional strategies employed by unions of building worker power through national laws and collective bargaining in the workplace were undermined by the growing power of multinational corporations that increasingly used global supply chains and cheap labor around the world to further build corporate power.

Multinational corporations and governments worked together to suppress worker organizing and create cheap, unprotected labor. While the labor movement attempted to address the new pro-corporate economic model by protesting corporate trade and investment agreements, structural adjustment policies and egregious uses of child and forced labor created problems that human rights organizations increasingly struggled to address. In the late 1980s, in response to the changing global production model and increased globalization, the human rights community created business and human rights programs designed to counter environmental degradation and the abuses of sweatshop labor.

The connections between the human and worker rights communities continued...