{"id":64251,"date":"2008-12-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-economics-professor-examines-employee-exploitation-in-new-book-are-worker-rights-human-rights\/"},"modified":"2008-12-08T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-08T00:00:00","slug":"uri-economics-professor-examines-employee-exploitation-in-new-book-are-worker-rights-human-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2008\/12\/uri-economics-professor-examines-employee-exploitation-in-new-book-are-worker-rights-human-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 economics professor examines employee exploitation in new book, Are Worker Rights Human Rights?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 December 8, 2008 — A Vietnamese woman was fatally injured in 1997 in a Ho Chi Minh City plant making Nike sneakers.<\/p>\n


\n Nike\u2019s response, according to a 溏心vlog免费B站 professor was, \u201cWe feel very badly about this, but these people don\u2019t actually work for us because Nike doesn\u2019t produce anything. Nike is a marketing company.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\t溏心vlog免费B站 Economics Professor Richard McIntyre said the response by officials at a Rhode Island shellfish processing plant was similar in 2001 when a woman who worked there was killed when a van transporting workers flipped over. When workers complained about conditions at the Town Dock plant, they were fired. But officials said the workers were not company employees. Rather, they were employed by a temporary help agency that placed the workers at Town Dock. Officials said they simply lost their jobs when Town Dock hired a new temporary employment agency.<\/p>\n


\n\tThese are among the cases that inspired McIntyre, a 1979 graduate of 溏心vlog免费B站 who also directs of the University\u2019s Honors Program, to write, Are Worker Rights Human Rights?, a 220-page book that examines labor standards in the global economy.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI argue that a prime and imminent tendency in the contemporary world economy is the lengthening of commodity chains through which the ultimate employer is able to wash his hands of moral responsibility for the conditions of work,\u201d McIntyre says in the preface of his book, published this year by The University of Michigan Press. \u201cThis is true in globalized production networks, such as those operated by Nike and other global manufacturers, as well as in temporary and subcontracted work situations in the United States and elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tMcIntyre said as he looked further into several cases, he began to see a pattern in all of them, whether it was \u201coff-shoring of jobs, privatization, outsourcing of jobs,\u201d in each case there was a conscious attempt to create social distance or what he calls \u201cmoral distance\u201d between the real employer and the real employee.<\/p>\n



\nBut does the South Kingstown resident\u2019s book answer the question on the cover?<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe kind of goofy answer, and this is what I argue in the middle chapters of the book, is that no, worker rights are not human rights, but human rights are not human rights either. There are no \u2018human\u2019 rights, only rights given by and enforceable in law,\u201d McIntyre said. \u201cI began to think about what does it mean to claim something as a human right. And I conclude that unless workers assert their collective rights as workers they are unlikely to secure their individual rights.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n What he began to see in the debate over globalization was that pro-globalization people would say that lengthy, international supply chains that result in loose controls on manufacturing and employment are inevitable and must be accepted. \u201cThe opponents on the labor side would say, \u2018No this is a violation of human rights\u2019 and that\u2019s the end of that conversation. You had two conversation-enders on either side,\u201d McIntyre said.<\/p>\n


\nMcIntyre examines the International Labor Organization, which is part of the United Nations and is the counterpart of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on work issues.<\/p>\n


\n He said the organization has identified what it calls fundamental rights at work, which it argues should be applicable everywhere. The four rights are: freedom from discrimination at work, freedom from child labor, freedom from forced labor, and freedom of association and to bargain collectively. The United States has ratified only two of the eight ILO conventions dealing with the four fundamental rights.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cOnce you get your hands around the fact that rights are created, the question is why some things are rights and not others,\u201d McIntyre asked. \u201cThe ILO wanted to identify as rights claims that had been codified by many countries. I then looked at the content of corporate codes of conduct, and they often talk about, \u2018we don\u2019t discriminate, we don\u2019t employ child labor, we don\u2019t employ forced labor,\u2019 but they don\u2019t talk about free association or collective bargaining.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nMcIntyre said the standard on free association and collective bargaining is critical because it gives workers themselves the opportunity to improve things for themselves. \u201cThe others are in a sense kind of patriarchal. We\u2019re going to be nicer to the poor people, but we don\u2019t want to give them any power,\u201d McIntyre said.<\/p>\n


\nMcIntyre looks at labor-based, non-governmental organizations as central to improving the plight of workers. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cIn Mexico and Central America, a lot of progress was made in the early part of the decade in building networks, relationships and winning contracts, but in the last three years, there has been a giant sucking sound toward China. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean are struggling because they are being under-priced by cheap Chinese labor.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cWhat happens in China right now is the key to what happens going forward,\u201d McIntyre continued. \u201cChina is the low cost producer, and until conditions get better there, which requires people in China to become organized, there is going to be downward pressure for everybody, not only in the U.S., but places like Mexico. In Mexico, the average wage is $1.00 an hour, which sounds cheap to us, but not relative to 50 cents an hour to 65 cents an hour in China.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nPictured above

\n溏心vlog免费B站 Economics Professor Richard McIntyre, a 1979 graduate of 溏心vlog免费B站 who also directs of the University\u2019s Honors Program, discusses Are Worker Rights Human Rights?, his new 220-page book that examines labor standards in the global economy during a recent 溏心vlog免费B站 Center for the Humanities forum. 溏心vlog免费B站 Department of Communications & Marketing photo by Michael Salerno Photography<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 December 8, 2008 — A Vietnamese woman was fatally injured in 1997 in a Ho Chi Minh City plant making Nike sneakers. Nike\u2019s response, according to a 溏心vlog免费B站 professor was, \u201cWe feel very badly about this, but these people don\u2019t actually work for us because Nike doesn\u2019t produce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64254,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}