2009 Human Rights in Labor and Employment Relations: International and Domestic Perspectives

Abstract

This volume is intended to collect the best current scholarship in the new and growing field of labor rights and human rights. We hope it will serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners as well as for teachers and students in university-level labor and human rights courses.The animating idea for the volume is the proposition that workers’ rights are human rights. But we recognize that this must be more than a slogan. Promoting labor rights as human rights requires drawing on theoretical work in labor studies and in human rights scholarship and developing closely reasoned arguments based on what is happening in the real world. Citing labor clauses in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one thing; relating them to the real world where workers seek to exercise their rights is something else. The contributors to this volume provide a firm theoretical foundation grounded in the reality of labor activism and advocacy in a market-driven global economy.