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chapter 10 A New Era of Global Human Rights Good for the Trade Unions? A great paradox embodies the relationship between human rights and labor rights in the world today. Institutional trade unionism is not doing so well. This is most obvious in Anglo-America, where union density has declined dramatically during the last quarter century, and where unionism’s influence, under both Labour and Democratic Party administrations, has been less than potent. With some notable exceptions—South Africa, South Korea, Brazil—one can say the same for union membership and power all over the world. According to the International Labor Organization’s World Labor Report, trade union membership dropped sharply during the 1990s, falling to less than 20 percent of workers in forty-eight out of ninety-two countries. The decline was most serious in manufacturing, even though on a worldwide basis the manufacture of actual products in actual factories was a booming proposition.1 But in this globalized production system, the connections between employers and employees have become increasingly attenuated. Whereas employees used to work for an identifiable common employer, today they occupy an uncertain location on a global production and distribution chain. Indeed, globalization has shifted much production and employment beyond the reach of the labor law of any single country, and it has blurred the meaning of the employment relationship, both in the nation that hosts the corporate headquarters and in the country where supplier firms are located. World auto production today is near record levels, but the number of workers in the United States, Japan, and Europe who work directly for the great auto multinationals has been reduced by 50 percent over the last quarter century. In the United States the big domestic auto companies no longer care all that much about the wages they negotiate for currently employed union workers; the real issues are decentralization, outsourcing, and the flexibility of their supply chains. This eclipse of trade unionism is not just one of declining numbers, bargaining leverage, and political clout. It has had a moral and ideological dimension as well. The effort to find some international mechanism that will defend trade Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 144 5/24/13 8:04 AM A New Era of Global Human Rights 145 unionism in a globalized economy has proven painfully slow and difficult, but this is not simply a question of capitalist power and prerogative. It reflects in addition a decline in the legitimacy and authority of unionism as an institution capable of defending the interests of ordinary people around the globe. Trade unions are too often considered defenders of the status quo; they are complicit in the maintenance of gender and racial hierarchies that are anathema in the global North. And in the global South those unions that actually do exist often seem to be an entrenched aristocracy. Thus in South Africa a showdown may well be in the offing between the unions, who represent a stratum of relatively well-off workers, and the African National Congress, which is desperate for export earnings and development funds. All of this may well be contrasted, even causally related, to the remarkable growth that has taken place during the last quarter century in the moral authority and sheer political potency of the movement for international human rights. War criminals are being tried in The Hague, the rights of women have been put on the social and political agenda even in the Middle East, and the defense of minority ethnic rights has achieved a legitimacy not seen since Woodrow Wilson injected “self-determination” into the diplomatic lexicon at the end of World War I. At no time since 1948, when Eleanor Roosevelt presided over the negotiations that gave birth to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has that document been held in higher regard. Even the most abusive governments pay lip service to its principles. All of the major industrial nations, except for the United States and China—admittedly big exceptions—have ratified the International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions that assert “freedom of assembly ” as a fundamental human right. Even the U.S. government endorses the key ILO conventions, if not for itself, then for everyone else. So as a condition for lifting its trade embargo against Cuba, U.S. law requires that island nation to put in place a transition regime “allowing the establishment of independent trade unions as set forth in Conventions 87 and 98 of the ILO.”2 This worldwide endorsement of the human rights idea...

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