|
Article Review
"Applying human rights standards to employment rights in the USA: The Human Rights Watch Report 2000"
This article reviews the international human rights standards, which the Human Rights Watch uses as the standard for judgment. It covers some comments on Human Rights in the labor market. The United States is the model to other countries in respecting human rights. Human rights protection in the United States is higher than in any other country. In this article, the author includes mainly what the Human Rights Watch report found, what the international human rights standards are, what the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley Act covers, and finally The Human Rights Watch report indicated the failure of the USA to meet its obligations under international law to protect workers' fundamental rights. In the past, human rights were preoccupied with the traditional civil and political rights. Only recently have the international human rights movement, human rights scholars, and labor organizations given attention to worker rights in terms of human rights. In the past, human rights organizations were concerned about egregious rights violations such as torture, death squads, and detentions without trial. The Human Rights Watch report shifts the traditional emphasis of rights violation by the state to rights violations by employers. The employers have the power to control the powerless workers and they have power to affect workers' lives. The report emphasizes that according to international human rights law, the government is responsible for protecting vulnerable persons and groups from abuse by the private sector. In the United States, labor laws vary according to the states, so in some states bargaining rights are diminished. Labor right violations have existed for a long time in the United States. By signing a contract prohibiting employees to join a union or to form an informal group, at the beginning of employment, employers had violated human rights of the workers. However, this type of contract was made illegal with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. The Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA, gave workers the freedom to participate in a union for the determination of wages, hours, and working conditions. When the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, collective bargaining was encouraged. The Wagner Act however, excluded agricultural and domestic workers bargaining collectively or from joining unions, which are the international human rights norms. The Taft-Hartley Act, an amendment of the Wagner Act, also did not cover such workers. In the United States, domestic service is still regarded as a second-class occupation. Since agricultural and domestic workers are excluded from forming or joining trade unions, or from bargaining collectively, millions of workers could be fired with impunity for seeking to form and join a union. Many farm workers, who are particularly undocumented migrant workers, do not have collective bargaining rights, since they are excluded from federal law. Human Rights Watch recommended that the U.S. Congress bring agricultural workers and domestic workers under the coverage of the NLRA, and that federal and state legislations be enacted to protect public employees' exercise of the right to bargain collectively and the right to strike under conditions established in international norms. Firing a worker for organizing is illegal, but the Human Rights Watch report found it common in the United States. The employers and their hired consultants have refined the methods used to unlawfully threaten employees, such as workplace closures, firings, wage and benefit cuts, and other consequences in such a manner that they can make can make the threatening seem legal. The current United States laws provide employers with great advantages over unions in communicating their views of collective bargaining and organization to the employees. Through the captive audience doctrine, employers can hold campaign meetings at the workplace on working time, while simultaneously denying union organizers access to the workplace. Employers can force workers to attend captive audience meetings on work time by making the participation mandatory, pressuring, one on one meeting between individual and supervisors, and workers are even coached by the consultants against unionization. But the non-employee union organizer doesn't have the right to enter private property to communicate with unorganized employees. There are cases where workers voted for the union representation, but even after years, they are waiting for the bargaining to begin, due to the employers' appeals pending in the court against union. There are several charges filed against the United States with the ILO's Freedom of Association Committee, pointing to delays in the system, and weak sanctions imposed on lawbreakers as permitting employers to destroy existing unions. The workers should have access to contract arbitration as a remedy where they have formed and joined a union in a previously unorganized workplace and the employer tends to bargain in bad faith. The employer have power to replace the worker permanently who exercise their right to strike over wages, hours and working conditions; the international standard recognize the right to strike as an important element of freedom of association. Human Rights Watch report recommends the Congress to enact a legislation to prohibit the permanent replacement of workers who exercise their rights to strike. The recent Human Rights Watch World Report 2002 indicates that continuing labor rights violations are affecting workers in many sectors. The most vulnerable group were migrant domestic workers with special temporary visas. In some cases, domestic workers were victims of trafficking, as they were deceived about the condition of their employment and brought to the United States to perform forced labor. Even though the United States is a liberal, law-oriented country, and has very good human rights practices overall, human rights standards in employment seems to be very low if seen in terms of migrant domestic workers, either they are undocumented or the one who has work authorization to work in the United States. This article raises a very important issue about human rights in term of labor rights. This essay is basically a summary of Human Rights Watch report 2000. I agree with the issues raised in the article. As a professor of Labor Policy and Labor Arbitration, the author did not give any decision on whether the United States, as the member of ILO, should ratify the ILO convention or not, even though the concerned officials of the United States declare that the standard of the Labor Laws in the United States are not lower than international human rights standards. The author talks about the migrant agriculture and domestic laborers being exploited and their human rights are violated in the employment. He doesn't talk about what should be done to avoid the violations. The recommendation could be that while inviting the migrant workers to work in any sector, there should be a contract and a law, which would oblige them to send back to their native countries, so that they have the rights to collective bargaining while they are employed in the United States. The author concluded the article with the quote of the conservatives who disliked talking about human rights 'because it inflamed the common people to revolutionary action and it inspired false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life' (Cranston, 1973). Quoting this statement in the end of the essay shows that human rights violations have been taking place in the United States since a long period of time and that it is still going on. Focusing on this statement, the author believes that some authoritarians still do not want to talk about human rights standard in employment. As the most powerful country, the United States still does not show any signs of ratifying the ILO convention, whether by declaring in international seminars that the United States is the liberal, law-oriented country or by saying that the United States is providing the utmost human rights standard among the other countries. I believe that if the United States respects the International Labor Law, the United States should show the solidarity among the world not by declaring the human rights standards being used in the employment, but by ratifying the ILO convention.
|