YUFA
External
“Workers’ Rights, Human Rights: Making the Connection” Conference Report (16-17 November 2007)
by Hyun Ok Park, Dept of Sociology, York University
9 Jan 08 – Organized by the Center for Research on Work and Society at York University, this conference was an opportunity for activists, academics, and policy makers to explore the link between labour rights and human rights in discussions around the themes of conceptual innovation, political practices, and history. Three main aspects of the linkage between labour rights and human rights were addressed by the conference: the shift of labour politics from an institutional to a democratic issue; the task of clarifying the concept of freedom of association as a democratic principle that makes labour and human rights intrinsic to each other; and the separation of provincial, national, international, and supranational politics as spaces for new thinking of labour rights.
Panelists offered rich analyses of how the rights of labour have been conceived and practiced in the twentieth century as conflict resolution between labour and management and how such practices in part reflected the cold war climate that separated economic and cultural / political rights. The binding together of labour and human rights was attributed by panelists to local and global politics since the 1990s, such as the integration of economic and cultural / political rights in the post-cold war. Linking of labour and human rights denotes a fundamental rethinking of labour rights as a democratic issue that concerns not just labourers and managers but the whole of civil society. This new conceptualization of labour rights promises a partnership of labour unions with various social and community organizations, signifying what labour studies in North America has investigated in terms of the change of labour activism from economic to social movement unionism.
A key human rights principle explored during the conference concerns the freedom of association, which constitutes the institutional principle of collective bargaining as the democratic right of labourers to strike. Roy Adams and Lee Swepston presented on the history of declarations of human rights and international enforcement of such rights at the state level. Tony Giles cautioned against the opposition of labour and the state or of the state and International Labour Organization (ILO), arguing that the state is not a unified actor and presenting examples of contradictory and contingent responses of the Canadian state to labour and human rights issues. Carol Piper and Lance Compa offered insightful analysis of local and global activism and especially the immanent link between them: Piper discussed the efforts to incorporate labour rights into free trade agreement in the US, while Compa presented the cases of successful movements that enforced multinational corporations to protect labour rights by exposing their violation of labour and human rights in contradiction to their embrace of corporate social responsibility in their home countries. Other panelists addressed other important issues, including global labour markets, legalization of labour rights, corporate accountability, and policy initiatives.
Thinking of workers as a heterogeneous entity authorizes a more complicated and nuanced account of the relationship between labour and human rights. Referring to the women's movement that had constructed women's rights as human rights, some floor comments not only called to recognize differences among workers, but also to incorporate the diversity of experience into new forms of labour politics.
Despite its centrality to any understanding of human rights, the question of history was perhaps the least addressed issue of the conference. Except for the few occasions when it was problematized by the audience, human rights were treated as an unmediated concept. For instance, the struggle for human rights under dictatorship in Columbia was noted to concretize the notions of human rights, i.e., the freedom of expression, the right to life, the freedom from torture. In fact, the changing democratic politics in South Korea, which is a subject of my book in progress, demonstrates that the notion of human rights has changed from its socioeconomic and political embedment during the national popular struggle of the1970s and 80s toward its cultural and political expression under neoliberalism since the early 1990s. Led by an alliance of intellectuals and labourers, human rights advocacy was previously considered intrinsic to the total liberation from capitalism, colonialism, and the military rule. Spearheaded by the civil society movement, the current human rights movement promotes the market as the tool of a new ethics of democracy, namely, peace, reconciliation, nonviolence. Going beyond essentialist and moralistic politics, recent political and philosophical discussions, including those by Badiou, Ranciere, Agamben, and Zizek, revisit modern experiences of human rights that have been pinned on the establishment of popular sovereignty and state sovereignty from the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the May 1968 struggle in France, to post-cold war liberal democracy. Framing labour rights as human rights demands attention to the historicity of the human rights concept that unsettles its meanings.
The conference provided a range of intellectual perspectives on the interrelationship between labour and human rights, ranging from labour practices, state politics, court rulings, to international and transnational affairs. It also provided an important occasion for those working in the field to explore ways to energize labour politics in the face of dwindling rates of unionization, expanding rates of involvement in the irregular workforce, and increasing reliance on migrant workers.
Other Delegates from this Conference:
Linda Briskin
Mark Thomas
+ Steven Tufts