People Before Profit by Charles Derber

Author:Charles Derber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

In February 2002, about thirty labor organizers, religious activists, student leaders, and policy experts met on St. Simon’s Island in George to launch a campaign to end global sweatshops. The group asked this: If we protect the Disney or Nike labels worldwide with international patents, why shouldn’t we have laws protecting the 16-year-old workers in every country who makes the product? The organizers agreed to draft a petition, to be signed by millions of people, that calls for the abolition of sweatshops and new globally enforceable worker rights.

In Chapter 5, we saw that business had to create a new constitution for the world economy based on property rights and enforced by the WTO. A global New Deal and post-Bretton Woods order requires its own new global constitution that will not abolish global property rights but offer equal protection for the global rights of workers, children, women, and nature. Interestingly, this does not require a new utopian experiment based on visionary international law. The world already has embraced a splendid set of human and worker rights, enshrined originally in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. These rights, later expanded in numerous UN Conventions dealing with children, women, and the environment, include nearly two-hundred worker rights propounded by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and ratified by most nations. To create the new globalization, we can move a long way by arming these existing rights with teeth. The idea of globally enforceable human and worker rights was the core vision of Citizens’ Globalism at the end of World War II and the founding of the UN, and it has resurfaced as the great challenge of the coming century.

A key aim of a post-Bretton Woods global order order is to expand and enforce these rights. Some global democrats look to the UN’s International Labor Organization since its historical mission has been to protect workers and to create agreements enshrining their rights. The ILO does not penalize transgressors although it can theoretically expel them or encourage other countries to not trade or invest in them, as it recently did unsuccessfully in Burma, an egregious human rights violator. But while many see the ILO as a paper tiger today, it could conceivably do the job tomorrow if citizens of the world created the pressure to make it happen.

The historic toothlessness of the ILO has led many to conclude that we must create an entirely new UN body. Like the ILO, its mission would be to affirm and protect the rights of all workers around the world. But, unlike the ILO, a new Worker Rights Authority (WRA) would be designed specifically as an enforcer with the judicial powers to judge and penalize offenses. Its authority would have to be as least as potent as that of today’s WTO and its sanctions would include empowering workers or citizens to sue corporations that abuse workers or fire union organizers. The new authority would be empowered to levy fines or other sanctions against rogue companies as well as possibly devise penalties against countries that encourage corporate abuse or turn a blind eye.

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