Suchergebnisse

We live in an increasingly polarized world: one summed up by President Clinton, "we're all in this together;" the other summed up by then-presidential candidate Trump, "I alone can fix it." These world views have implications for workers and how the future workplace is ordered. In this Article, I explore the idea that a natural human rights approach to workplace regulations will tend to favor the we're-all-in-this-together view, whereas the Lochnerian or neo-liberal view tends to favor an individualistic world view. The Article's six-step analytical approach starts with a historical analysis of labor law jurisprudence, concluding that U.S. labor laws must be filtered through a law-and-economic lens of U.S.-styled capitalism to predict the outcomes of legal disputes and to expose human rights infirmities inherent to that approach. In step two, I explore T.H. Marshall's account of citizenship, concluding that Marshall's rights-based rubric is too limited to fully explain workers' rights, which tend to cut across the full gamut of human rights. In step three, I expand upon Marshall's work to build a framework for evaluating workplace laws based on the worker as a citizen of the labor force who has human rights. I do this using two methodologies: (1) comparative legal analysis between U.S. law and international human rights standards; and (2) jurisprudential analysis of fundamental values within a rights-based framework. In step four, I modify John Rawls's famous thought experiment to include a veil of empathy. In that modified experiment, I conclude that participants in the original position behind a veil of empathy would generate values underlying human rights, namely autonomy (to become part author of one's work life) and dignity (to be treated as a person always as an end and never merely as a means). In step five, I apply this human rights approach to show that workers' and employers' interests conflict at the interests-level and, more fundamentally, at the values-level. I conclude that these conflicts are primarily over the distribution of that which labor and capital create. This distributional question is fundamental a question of moral and political justice, which will and does have real political consequences. In step six, I set forth a path along which this research project should explore.

How to put the labor movement back at the center of American political culture.

In the absence of trade union freedoms, "NGOs" have emerged to defend migrant workers' rights. This article takes a close look at the mobilisation of such organisations, assesses their short-term impact, and examines their role in China's political system. NGOs display a new form of activism based on pragmatic positioning and technical knowhow, especially in legal matters, all the while testing political boundaries. While such organisations act as a real counterweight within the system whose dysfunctions they seek to correct, their mobilisation is struggling to become institutionalised. They thus reflect the growth of a social form of democracy that helps the authoritarian system adapt, and hence contributes to preserving it. (China Perspect/GIGA)