Professor Roy J Adams - A rights revolution

During the past several decades, throughout the advanced democratic world there has been a rights revolution. People of colour have risen up and insisted that they be treated with dignity and respect and that they be accorded equal opportunities and equal treatment in both the economic and political spheres. Women followed suite with considerable success as did aboriginal people, the disabled and gays and lesbians.

Those groups were successful for many reasons. Among the most important they were successful because they educated their members to understand that discrimination was wrong and should be rejected by all decent people. Even more importantly, they taught their members to be on high alert for instances of discriminatory behaviour and quickly to organise effective responses to them.

To an unfortunate extent, organised labour has failed to do that with respect to labour rights as human rights. As a result the rights revolution has passed labour by. Indeed as the rights of blacks, women, native people, the disabled and gays were advancing, the rights and influence of labour have been receding.

Recently, in my home town of Hamilton, Canada a medical organisation offered to take over a home for the aged run by the city on the condition that it would be able to operate the home on a ‘non-union’ basis. From a human rights perspective this was tantamount to insisting that the home be operated exclusively by white, Anglo-Saxon males, but there was little outrage reported in the Hamilton press. Similar incidents occur daily in so-called advanced, democratic countries.

Part of the problem has been that, as of the 1950s or so, the battle for labour rights seemed to have been won. The great labour struggles took place from the 1880s through the 1940s and seemed to have established a new reality in which labour was recognised as a full social partner. But vigilance has always been the price not only of liberty but also of all basic rights and since the advent of the deregulatory era in the early 1980s an anti-labour rights counter-revolution has been in progress cloaked largely in the garb of efficiency.

It is time to get the movement for labour’s human rights back on the rails. Job one is education. Labour activists need to inform themselves about the rich body of international law with respect to labour rights as human rights. Every trade union leader should be thoroughly familiar with the International Labour Organisation’s Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and the ILO’s freedom of association committees. International principles regarding fundamental human rights should be as well understood as domestic law with respect to labour organising and collective bargaining. Union leaders need to convince themselves and their members that anti-unionism is as serious a violation of human rights as discrimination, child exploitation, even slavery. Labour leaders need to educate activists to be outraged at instances such as the Hamilton incident mentioned above and train them to organise quick and effective reactions to them.

If trade unionists remain passive and tolerant when events occur that, from a human rights perspective, are outrageous they perpetuate the idea that unions are no more than special interest service providers rather than the embodiment of a noble social movement. If that notion prevails, it seems likely that the movement must continue to decline in numbers and influence. That would be a tragedy for all of us.