Abstract
Readers of this journal need little reminder that around the globe we are witnessing the decline of unionization and respect for trade union rights as neoliberal strategies are repeatedly adopted in the name of economic growth. Evidence of the new precarious, flexible worker extends from the dissolution of China’s iron rice bowl to the casualization of the academic workforce. A telling example from Susan Kang’s Human Rights and Labor Solidarity describes how, starting in the early 1990s, the IMF and the World Bank made loans to the Global South contingent on the adoption of labor flexibility programs. In an effort to facilitate the profits of multinationals, the World Bank developed the Employing Workers Index to rate countries, including “difficulty of hiring, rigidity of hours, difficulty of firing, rigidity of employment, nonwage labor cost (percentage of salary), and firing costs (weeks of wages). States with stronger legal protections for workers received lower rankings” (p. 38). Today this logic has been extended to U.S. teachers, firefighters, and police, making Kang’s analysis extremely relevant to American politics.
In this thoroughly researched and well-organized book, Kang examines the opportunities for trade unions to pursue their interests. She argues that framing grievances as human rights concerns establishes new norms about trade union rights violations and renews their legitimacy. In this way trade unions have adopted a strategy that has influenced a generation of anti-sweatshop campaigns, women’s rights efforts, and, more recently, human trafficking education. All of these efforts found little traction targeting governments until they broadened their scope internationally, presented their claims in the language of human rights, and joined with formal and informal international institutions to pressure policymakers. Such framing, Kang points out, is compelling due to this particular moment when global actors are sympathetic to Western human rights ideals.
While Kang finds the human rights framing critical to pursuing labor union rights, it is insufficient on its own. Campaigns must also link their goals to those of the state (political or economic) with the promise of mutual gain. Or they must effectively persuade powerful judicial institutions to weigh in favor of trade union rights. In addition, international allies are critical for success.
Kang examines these strategies through three case studies. In South Korea, trade unions pursued a wholesale reform of trade union protections by linking their futures to the state’s need to recover from the 1997 Asian financial crisis and desire to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In contrast, the campaign of the Canadian public-sector workers demonstrates the potential of the judicial strategy. In the third case, trade unions in the U.K. took aim at a law that allowed employers to establish individual contracts with workers who promised not to join unions. The strategy in that final case included both judicial action (through the European Court of Human Rights) and seizing a political opening for policymakers to craft change. While all three cases offer examples of success, their gains were limited due to a focus on individual claims at the expense of altering the structural conditions that are stymying unions.
In addition to these cogent case studies, Kang offers a history lesson for understanding how we arrived at this juncture. She describes the international climate that led to the development of the International Labor Organization and discusses how international actors saw a strong relationship between industrial peace and geopolitical peace. Such a worldview meant that moral and ethical concerns were codified in domestic policy.
Today we are a long way from policymakers’ rooting their decisions in the legitimacy of rights. Rather, the neoliberal turn has created an international political system rooted in privatized self-interest. As such, it would be easy to see this book as lacking in optimism, yet Kang crafts each chapter to examine opportunities that exist for labor union and international actors, that, in turn, can be adopted for a range of advocacy efforts.