Labor Studies Working Group Symposium, "Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights?..."

October 27, 2016. PARCC Conversations in Conflict Studies: The Tenth Decade Work, Labor, and Citizenship Project presents “Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights? Diversifying Labor Strategies in a Changing World”

Labor scholars are divided on the issue of whether a human rights approach to workers’ struggles is in the best interests of labor or not. Those who disagree with this approach claim, among other things, that a human rights approach favors individual autonomy over collective solidarity and relies on elite-driven judicial strategies rather than “class-based, grassroots, fight-back strategies,” in the words of one skeptic. “Labor rights are human rights” proponents think that this approach holds out the best hope for workers in the era of neoliberal globalization and the growing irrelevance of citizenship-based rights in the context of both transnational capital and transnational labor. Guest Speakers: Susan Kang, Department of Political Science at CUNY and Author of Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy; Joseph Cohen, Executive Director, ACLU of West Virginia; Larsene Taylor, Retired, UE Local 150, North Carolina Public Service Workers Union; Karl Flecker, Former National Director for Human Rights/Anti-Racism, Canadian Labour Congress.