Nousland

Just Linkage: A Realistic Utopian Proposal for Promoting Global Labor Justice Christian Barry and Sanjay Reddy (The Commissioning Editor of Ethics & International Affairs at the Carnegie Council, Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University)

This essay presents a proposal for linking trade and labor standards. It argues that violations of agreed international labor standards can, in the appropriate institutional setting, provide solid grounds for invoking trade sanctions. It consists of three sections. The first section develops a proposal for linking respect for labor standards with the right to participate in international trade. We discuss the content of the appropriate labor standards, the conditions under which linkage would be justified, and the best forms that such linkage might take. We argue that implementing our proposal would improve working conditions and living standards in poor countries while also expressing an appropriate attitude towards seriously unjust labor practices. Our linkage proposal is thus defended in terms of both its consequential efficacy, and the importance of respecting the agency and integrity of those who participate in trade and other forms of economic interaction. The second section creates a typology of the arguments that international economists and policymakers have offered (or could plausibly offer) against linkage. We show that although these arguments articulate legitimate concerns, they rest on unwarranted assumptions concerning the realism and practicability of linkage, show an impoverished understanding of the forms that linkage might take, and generally neglect the importance of non-consequentialist values in the comparative assessment of institutions that facilitate trade and other commercial activities. The third section suggests some general lessons that emerge from the debates concerning linking trade and labor standards, not least the importance of reflecting more imaginatively on questions of institutional design and reform at the international level.

A “Real” Paradox in Human Rights Anat Biletzki - Dept. of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

Abstract

The oft-repeated mantra of human rights organizations is that “human rights are not political’,” human rights being grounded in universalism, which is diametrically opposed to political partisanship. The philosophical question to ask is: how can rights discourse be anything but political? This gives rise to a conceptual paradox concerning the very fundamentals of human rights; it also leads the way to pragmatic quagmires in which “global” human rights organizations find themselves. But the epitome of this (conceptual and concrete) dilemma is to be found in conflict situations where local/national human rights groups operate, for these groups literally embody the contradiction between universal moral principles and particular human interests. Does this mean, then, that the ideological opposition between politics and human rights, as originally contrued in standard and traditional human rights talk, has brought the concrete manifestation of human rights to a dead-end? Is there any way for local human rights organizations – real, operational, organizations that are not globally oriented – to substantiate their particular focus without reneging on universal demands? Or are they doomed to represent, in their respective agendas, their political, “biased” context? Finally, and going back to the conceptual level – does this imply that the foundational idea of human rights indeed harbors an irreconcilable paradox?  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the human rights organizations that accompany it, will serve as a very germane illustration of this problematic. From the semantics of human rights concepts (“victim”, “perpetrator”, “non-combatant”, “conscientious objection”, etc.), to the pragmatics of human rights discussions in a specific area and time of strife, one can identify the alienation of universalism as the clear and almost immediate consequence of  a context so rife with “politics”. Social and cultural phenomena within each society (Israeli and Palestinian), the convoluted state of the relationships between their respective NGOs, and the tensions arising between local and global organizations provide a working example, a case-study, of the “real” implications of this inherent paradox.