A culture of near-impunity has taken shape in much of U.S. labor law and practice. Any employer intent on resisting workers' self-organization can drag out legal proceedings for years, fearing little more than an order to post a written notice in the workplace promising not to repeat unlawful conduct. Many employers have come to view remedies like back pay for workers fired because of union activity as a routine cost of doing business, well worth it to get rid of organizing leaders and derail workers' organizing efforts. [Article in French]

[Excerpt] No country or company should gain a commercial edge in international trade by jailing or killing union organizers, crushing independent union movements, or banning strikes. Gaining an advantage in labor costs should not depend on exploiting child labor or forced labor, or discriminating against women or oppressed ethnic groups. Deliberately exposing workers to life-threatening safety and health hazards, or holding wages and benefits below livable levels should not be permissible corporate strategies. But these are exactly the abuses that happen all too often in a rapidly globalized world trading system based on "free trade."

[Excerpt] In the 1990s the parallel but separate tracks of the labor movement and the human rights movement began to converge. This chapter examines how trade union advocates adopted human rights analyses and arguments in their work, and human rights organizations began including workers' rights in their mandates.

The first section, "Looking In," reviews the U.S. labor movement's traditional domestic focus and the historical absence of a rights-based foundation for American workers' collective action. The second section, "Looking Out," covers a corresponding deficit in labor's international perspective and action. The third section, "Labor Rights Through the Side Door," deals with the emergence of international human rights standards and their application in other countries as a key labor concern in trade regimes and in corporate social responsibility schemes. The fourth section, "Opening the Front Door to Workers' Rights," relates trade unionists' new turn to human rights and international solidarity and the reciprocal opening among human rights advocates to labor concerns. The conclusion of the chapter discusses criticisms by some analysts about possible overreliance on human rights arguments, and offers thoughts for strengthening and advancing the new labor-human rights alliance.

[Excerpt] In a 2002 study, the US Government Accountability Office reported that more than 32 million workers in the United States lack protection of the right to organise and to bargain collectively. But since then, the situation has worsened. A series of decisions by the federal authorities under President George Bush has stripped many more workers of organising and bargaining rights. The administration took away bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of employees in the new Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department.18 In the years before the 2009 change of administration, a controlling majority of the five-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), appointed by President Bush, denied protection to graduate student employees, disabled employees, temporary employees and other categories of workers.

An October 2006, a NLRB decision was especially alarming for labour advocates. The NLRB set out a new, expanded definition of 'supervisor' under the section of US labour law that excludes supervisors from protection of the right to organise and bargain collectively. This exclusion has enormous repercussions for millions of workers who might now become 'supervisors' and lose protection of their organising and bargaining rights.21 This case is discussed in more detail below in connection with a complaint to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Committee on Freedom of Association.

[Excerpt] Corporate social responsibility (CSR) brings an important dimension to the global economy. CSR can enhance human rights, labor rights, and labor standards in the workplace by joining consumer power and socially responsible business leadership—not just leadership in Nike headquarters in Oregon or Levi Strauss headquarters in California, but leadership in trading house headquarters in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and leadership at the factory level in Dongguan and Shenzhen. Ten years ago, I would not have said this. I viewed corporate social responsibility and corporate codes of conduct as public relations maneuvers to pacify concerned consumers. Behind a facade of social responsibility, profits always trumped social concerns. CSR was only a fig leaf hiding abusive treatment of workers. But in recent years some concrete, positive results from effectively applied CSR programs convinced me of their value. In Mexico in 2001, workers at the Korean-owned KukDong sportswear factory succeeded in replacing a management and government dominated trade union with a democratic union of the workers' choice. Compliance officials from Nike and Reebok, two of the largest buyers, joined forces with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) enforcing their codes of conduct to achieve this result.

[Excerpt] Le climat antisyndical qui a cours aux États-Unis a conduit de grandes enterprises européennes à déménager certaines de leurs installations dans ce pays. Par exemple, BMW construit présentement une vaste usine en Caroline du Nord, État qui possède le taux de syndicalisation le plus faible aux États-Unis, et Mercedes-Benz met sur pied une exploitation en Alabama, autre Etat antisyndical.

Là où les syndicats existent encore, leurs membres subissent de vives pressions pour accepter une diminution des salaires et des avantages sociaux pour preserver leurs emplois. D'après le Department of Labor des États-Unis, le salaire réel des travailleurs américains a diminué de plus de 13 % dans l'ensemble au cours du dernier quart de siècle. Seules l'arrivée massive des femmes sur le marché du travail et une augmentation de l'emploi pour les jeunes ont pu maintenir le revenu familial.

[Excerpt] The move to cheap labor and unregulated enterprise abroad puts an individual firm in an advantageous competitive position. But in the aggregate, this movement creates conditions for global economic stagnation. An enterprise cannot have constantly cheaper foreign sources of supply and constantly lower wages and benefits at home, on one hand, and constantly expanding domestic and foreign markets to sell its goods, on the other hand. As each firm sheds workers, cuts the wages of those who remain, and invests in cheap labor sources for manufactured goods, it will find that mass purchasing power to buy its products has dissipated.

Proponents of NAFTA sought to mask this contradiction with rhetoric about "dynamizing" the North American economy. New U.S. investment in Mexico made secure by the terms of NAFTA would expand the Mexican middle class and create demand for products and services from the United States. U.S. workers in low wage, labor intensive sectors, who would have lost their jobs anyway to Thailand or to Poland, would now find productive work in sectors serving a growing North American market.

There is no evidence that this is anything more than rhetoric. Where large investments in Mexico have been made by Ford, Volkswagen and other auto manufacturers, workers’ wages have been cut and their unions enfeebled, even where productivity rivals that of the home factories. Where substantial investments have been made in the maquiladora, wages are held to a pittance. Massive layoffs and plant closings have been announced by U.S. companies with investments in Mexico—GE, GTE, AT&T, IBM, Xerox and others. Meanwhile, the Chiapas uprising exposed Mexico as desperately in need of far-reaching social and political reforms, not elite deal-making with the United States.

[Excerpt] For those of us who are Donald Trump's age, there is a special pleasure in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 16th season in the National Basketball Association. Scoring, rebounding, passing off, Kareem is leading the Los Angeles Lakers to another division championship and playoff appearance. There's nothing new about that. More important now is the unbroken line to our youth that Kareem represents. I was upset when the Rochester Royals left my hometown, but get this: A guy my age is still starring in the N.B.A.!

[Excerpt] Publicly confessing fidelity is a risky step, hard to do without sounding sanctimonious. The supposed return to traditional values is the last bandwagon I'd want to ride. Then there's the risk of hypocrisy. I can't guarantee that this streak of fidelity won't end. The only way out is to confess ambivalence. I'm not so sure I want to be faithful. With both of us working, raising kids and running a household, married life takes on a draining routine. Lingering mornings of love play are long gone now; little feet and little stomachs and quirky faucets and job deadlines see to that, just as they lengthen the intervals between loving nights.

[Excerpt] Without an overall trade agreement containing stronger labour rights linkage than that of the NAALC model, advocates will have no central forum or mechanism for dealing with workers' rights in the Americas. This paper suggests that labour rights advocates can and should shape a new viable social dimension in hemispheric trade and demand its inclusion in the FTAA.

The emphasis of this paper is on a viable, not a definitive or triumphant, solution. Workers and their advocates do not triumph in the current conjuncture of economic and political forces. They do not will their way to victory with the sharpness of their criticism or the strength of their denunciations; they hold their losses and make small gains where possible. Workers' advocates must coldly calculate what can be done with the reality they are dealt, hoping the outcomes will advance the longer-term struggle for social justice.

[Excerpt] Fourteen years after the military coup the Chilean people are still seeking the road back to democracy. Yet finding that road requires a strong, democratic, united labor movement voicing the aspirations of working people. To achieve that goal Chilean labor leaders have to resolve important tensions in the unions' relationship to political parties, the role of union officials who are also committed political partisans and the balance between political and economic demands.

[Excerpt] Morristown brings to life the human element missing from the political and legal analysis of the issues presented in this symposium issue. The hour-long documentary takes us back and forth from an Eastern Tennessee region that has seen a rapid influx of Mexican immigrants to the villages and factory zones in Mexico where these immigrants started their journeys. The alternation has a powerful, accelerating effect for the contrasts it portrays but also for the similarities of globalization's effects on working people in both countries.

[Excerpt] Labor rights advocacy is the most direct challenge to the primacy of a marketplace ideology in which efficiency and profit are the highest values. Labor rights advocates promote values of fairness, justice, and solidarity in global commerce. The battle to achieve enforceable hard law that protects workers' rights in the global economy is an important contribution to the labor movement's revitalization.

Can a beleaguered movement take on multinational companies and the governments that appease them on these varied international grounds when there is so much still to do on organizing, collective bargaining, and domestic political action? There really is no choice. International trade policy is now a battleground for workers' rights, just as national economic policy was the focus of the great reform movements of the turn of the century and the New Deal of the 1930s. The multiple arenas of international labor rights controversy are also forums for labor rights advocacy. The opportunities they present are as varied, and potentially as powerful, as the challenges.

[Excerpt] This paper reviews labor rights in the trade arrangements of four regional and binational settings in the Americas:

• the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) among Canada, Mexico and the United States;

• the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) among Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay;

• the Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA); and

• the Caribbean Community (Caricom) embracing several island nations in a common market.

The labor rights agreements, charters and declarations examined here are at different levels of development and experience. They are "works in progress," just beginning to experiment with the central challenge of ensuring that no country gains competitive advantage in an integrated market by violating workers' fundamental rights. Each labor rights system studied here takes a different approach to this challenge. Sometimes the differences are slight, as with the labor agreements under NAFTA and the CCFTA; sometimes the differences are dramatic, as between social dimensions in NAFTA and Mercosur.

[Excerpt] En este país los sindicatos continúan criticando los puntos débiles del Acuerdo, especialmente la exclusión de asuntos referentes a la sindicalización, la negociación y las huelgas, los mecanismos de solución de controversias, y la carencia de soluciones ejecutorias bajo el ACL. Al mismo tiempo, se han dado cuenta de que resulta un foro muy útil para exponer casos de violaciones de los derechos de los trabajadores por parte de corporaciones multinacionales que operan en el marco del TLC. Con ello intentan promover una presión popular dirigida a detener la ampliación del TLC a Chile y el resto de América Latina, a menos que se dote al acuerdo comercial hemisférico de una dimensión social más fuerte.

The proliferation of corporate codes of conduct generates both alliance and tension between trade unions and NGOs that deal with workers’ rights in the global economy. Alliance, because trade unions and NGOs share a common desire to halt abusive behaviour by multinational companies and a broader goal of checking corporate power in the global economy. Tension, because unions and NGOs have differing institutional interests, different analyses of problems and potential solutions, and different ways of thinking and talking about social justice in the global economy. There are fears that codes of conduct may be used to undermine effective labour law enforcement by governmental authorities and undermine workers’ power in trade unions. The substance behind the rhetoric on this new generation of corporate codes of conduct is certainly open to question. However, this paper argues that, given unions’ weak presence in the global assembly line and the rapid-response capabilities of many NGOs, such codes are a valuable asset. Trade unions and NGOs still have more in common with each other than either has with corporations, governments, or international organisations that see free trade and free-flowing capital as the solution to low labour standards. But both need to be clear-eyed about their differences and their proper roles as they navigate the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

[Excerpt] Even in disagreement with some of its policy prescriptions, I find From Consent to Coercion a strong, meticulously documented, powerfully argued, thought-provoking work that serious scholars and practitioners of trade unionism and labour law should read and engage. We Americans can still look at Canadian labour law and practice as a model compared with our own, but thanks to Panitch and Swartz's work we can see it with eyes open, not eyes wide

[Excerpt] Each leg of a trip to "Chappy," as residents know it, begins with a formidable bottleneck. First you must get to Cape Cod through the gantlet of traffic on U.S. Route 6 between the interstate highways and the Bourne Bridge. Then there is the regulated ferry service to Martha's Vineyard, which requires late winter reservations for summer season car transport, thus limiting the volume of cars allowed on the main island.

[Excerpt] The contributions of Hoyt Wheeler, Julius Getman and David Brody in the December issue of this journal give important insights into strengths and weaknesses of the Human Rights Watch Report on workers' rights in the United States. Stephen Wood, Sheldon Friedman and the editors are to be commended for advancing a debate on the Report's approach, findings and recommendations.

Each of these three major figures in American labour scholarship brings the power of decades of research and analysis on these issues. Together, their critiques stretch the Report backward and forward: back to unstated assumptions that underlie the Report (or that it neglected, which could have better informed the Report), and forward to some unstated (or, again, missed) implications of its findings and recommendations.

[Excerpt] Contrasts like that mark the French island in the Lesser Antilles chain. Grande-Terre is flat, hot and bright. Its long, straight beaches are a natural extension of low-lying terrain, full of light green sugarcane fields and grassy marsh.

Basse-Terre is a forest green, made somber as the sun rotates the shadows of its high central mountains past the villages below. Only the narrow belt highway around Basse-Terre separates its curving beaches from steep foothills. At every turn in the road, a tiny stream carries the runoff from the mountains, where there are waterfalls and deep pools and springs. Here, instead of the high, classic rainbows of Grande-Terre, the coincidence of sun and rain makes for a thick, stunted rainbow seemingly imbedded in a hillside, like a pre-Columbian slab worshiped by an ancient tribe.