Global Policy Forum

By Nelson Lichtenstein

Are human rights related to trade union power? Do both march in tandem around the globe? For nearly two centuries the answer was almost always a resounding "Yes!" On every continent, the growth of organized labor seemed to herald the emancipation of common people and the demise of their oppressors.

Today we live in an era of global human rights. War criminals are put on trial in The Hague. Women's rights are on the social and political agenda in the Middle East. From Burma to Nigeria, the world pays close attention to the free speech rights of political dissidents. Thousands of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) expose human rights violations and promote social, economic, and legal standards aimed at benefiting those who toil in factories in poor countries.

Some 182 labor and human rights codes of conduct have been adopted by corporations and industry associations around the globe. Prodded by groups like the Workers Rights Consortium and the Ethical Trading Initiative, some corporations promise to pay living wages, open their factories to monitors, and even provide employees a voice in the workplace. Reebok, the multinational sportswear firm, advertises its corporate code as being "based on the core principles" of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The company markets its soccer balls and other goods with a "Guaranteed: Manufactured without Child Labor" label.

But sensitivity to human rights has done nothing to staunch trade unionism's worldwide decline. The International Labor Organization reports that unions are in retreat in most nations. During the 1990s union membership fell to less than 20% of workers in 48 out of 92 countries.

The paradox is clear. Consider the US, where since the 1960s a multicultural, gender-sensitive tradition of rights has been legitimized and codified in US law, within major corporations, inside governmental bureaucracies, and across the political spectrum. Most big corporations favor "diversity" and boast of their compliance with civil rights and gender-equality laws.

At the same time, in no other large nation, save for outright dictatorships, have trade unions lost so many members and so much political leverage. Membership has dropped sharply over the last quarter-century, and today less than one in ten private-sector American workers are union members.

What severed the traditional link between strong trade unions and respect for human rights? To be sure, trade unions have lost members and political clout owing partly to a decline in their moral authority and hence legitimacy as institutions capable of defending the interests of ordinary working people. Too often trade unions are seen as defending an unjust status quo, as complicit in maintaining gender and racial hierarchies, or else as being so politically self-interested that they injure the rest of society.

Moreover, government and businesses have clearly become increasingly hostile to trade unions over the last 25 years. As Human Rights Watch reported, "In a system replete with all the appearance of legality and due process, workers' exercise of rights to organize, to bargain, and to strike...has been frustrated by many employers who realize they have little to fear from labor law enforcement."

But the evisceration of US labor law also reflects the extraordinary power of America's culture of rights. Rights are universal and are held only by individuals, which means that a company CEO enjoys them just as much as his office clerk. Under a regime of universal individual rights, it becomes difficult to grant trade unions the legal status and privileges of a collectivity distinct from and superior to its members.

For millions of workers, not to mention their bosses, union solidarity has become an antiquated or even alien concept. This is hardly surprising. In the contemporary American workplace, employers use their court-protected free-speech rights to spread millions of dollars worth of anti-union propaganda, to intimidate individual workers, and to persuade employees that joining a union would mean losing their jobs.

But are unions relevant anymore? Some argue that in the US and elsewhere the human rights regime is so powerful and pervasive that trade unionism is no longer necessary or even desirable. If workers are protected against sexual harassment by a state agency rather than by their union shop steward, the employee's rights will be adequately protected. If it is legislation rather than a clause in a union contract that regulates health and safety conditions in the workplace, a factory's air will smell just as sweet.

But a century of experience in America and other parts of the world demonstrates that, by itself, no legal-regulatory system can enforce, by administrative order or judicial ruling, the inner life of millions of workplaces. As anti-sweatshop and human rights advocates in places like Malaysia and South China understand, no regime of rights is possible without hearing from workers, whose voices will remain silent unless some institution protects them from the consequences of speaking up.

The history of social regulation in the industrial West is unambiguous: systematic, organized pressure at the workplace is essential to breathing life into the rights enshrined in statute books. Without a new burst of trade unionism in poor countries, the worldwide movement to insure human and labor rights will lose momentum and stall, turning hope into helplessness for millions of desperate workers.

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