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IN 1984, CONGRESS PASSED THE TRADE AND TARIFF ACT, WHICH LINKED THE RIGHTS GRANTED WORKERS IN INDIVIDUAL COUNTRIES TO PREFERENTIAL TRADE BENEFITS. THIS ARTICULATION OF AMERICAN SUPPORT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS WON APPROVAL FROM SOME GROUPS BUT CRITICISM FROM THOSE WHO QUESTION WHETHER THE UNITED STATE SHOULD INTERFERE IN THE INTERNAL POLICIES OF OTHER STATES. NEVERTHELESS, THESE PROVISIONS ARE LIKELY TO BE FOLLOWED BY AN EVEN BROADER APPLICATION OF THE SAME PRINCIPLES IN NEW LEGISLATION.

An expert urges a new approach to protect labor rights after recent trade negotiations have failed to do so.

In Are Worker Rights Human Rights? Richard McIntyre, astride Marxian and institutionalist schools of economic thought, forcefully argues and illustrates how rights talk has time and again been at odds with the advancement of collective worker rights, be it in the context of the antislavery movement then or the antisweatshop movement now. After sketching the outlines of the book, this essay inquires whether collective worker rights themselves might similarly be at cross-purposes with the struggle against exploitation in the Marxian sense of the term. The essay also questions whether McIntyre's notion of social distance, while very useful in capturing and calling attention to the moral and legal remoteness of multinationals from workers at the other end of global commodity chains, might be leaving local class struggles over surplus overseas out of the picture. Adapted from the source document.

Reemergence of worker rights as an issue in U.S. trade policy.

In response to increasing financial instabilities in emerging economies, policy makers have focused on possibly stabilizing institutions. Worker rights have the potential to be stabilizing since they may aid in productivity growth and since they may help to allocate economic resources more equitably between labor and capital. As supply and demand become more likely to grow together than apart, the chances for financial crises may be reduced. This article's results confirm that liberalized economies are more likely to experience banking crises and that worker rights may be a stabilizing institution.

Suggests that two US legislative initiatives, the Wagner Act of 1935 & the Civil Rights Act of 1964, stand as the most important symbols of the reformist state of the 1930s-1960s. Though both pieces of legislation shared much in common, the Wagner Act is distinguished by its support for a nongovernmental institution, the trade union, which functioned within the very womb of the capitalist enterprise. Unions were burdened with the task of negotiating with employers using the one tool at their disposal, the strike. This task proved to be very difficult, & led many unions to become quasi-job trusts for their members. By the 1970s, unionism was in retreat because the political structures that had once supported it were in an advanced state of decay. A series of judicial decisions also weakened labor rights & union solidarity. In the process, labor protection has become a matter of legalisms rather than of social regulation based on collective bargaining. This shift is taken to be a significant danger to individual worker rights, as it is dependent on the expertise of government officials, fails to deal with structural features of the economy, & is difficult to enforce. It is concluded that workers' rights will be protected only under the revival of a mass democratic trade union movement. D. M. Ryfe