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Workers' Rights, Human Rights, and Solidarity Across Borders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2011

Gay Seidman
Gay Seidman
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Extract

Over the past few decades, as restless capital has moved about the world looking for cheaper production sites, labor campaigns have looked across borders for support. In a world where threats of capital mobility and outsourcing strategies are used to push wages and working conditions ever lower, local activists have called on international allies to insist that multinationals improve the treatment of workers—especially in the developing world, where local governments often seem unwilling or unable to protect their citizens at work and where workers on their own have little leverage.

Type
Scholarly Controversy: Labor Rights as Human Rights?
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , Fall 2011 , pp. 169 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2011

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References

NOTES

1. Alston, Philip, “Labour Rights As Human Rights: The Not So Happy State of the Art,” in Labour Rights As Human Rights, ed. Alston, (Oxford, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Kleck, Margaret and Sikkink, Kathryn, Activists Without Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1998)Google Scholar.

3. For an extended discussion of how this pattern played out in Bangladesh, see Brooks, Ethel, “Transnational Campaigns Against Child Labour: The Garment Industry in Bangladesh,” in Bandy, Joe and Smith, Jackie, eds., Coalitions Across Borders: Transnational Protest and the Neoliberal Order (Lanham, MD, 2005), 95–117Google Scholar.

4. http://www.workersrights.org/dsp/Designated%20Suppliers%20Program%20-%20Revised.pdf.

5. See, for example, Ally, Shireen, From Servants to Workers: Domestic Workers and the South African State (Ithaca, NY, 2009)Google Scholar; Anner, Mark, Solidarity Transformed (Ithaca, NY, 2011)Google Scholar; Piore, Michael and Schrank, Andrew, “Toward Managed Flexibility: The Revival of Labor Inspection in the Latin World,” International Labour Review 147 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberto Pires, “State Capacity and Bureaucratic Accountability in the New Development State: Lessons From Labor Inspection in Brazil,” presented to the Latin American Studies Association Meeting, Toronto, October 2010.