Workers' rights are human rights, books by Cornell labor faculty show

By Linda Myers

Workers' rights as human rights, and the U.S. labor movement, get a fresh look in three recently released books from Cornell University Press and its ILR imprint, by faculty members at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

In Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards, Lance Compa, a senior lecturer at Cornell's ILR School, applies commonly accepted international human rights standards to the U.S. workplace, which he finds consistently violates workers' right to associate, organize and bargain collectively.

Compa's book details how "the American labor movement's campaign to improve job conditions, once in the vanguard, has been hobbled and marginalized for decades through court rulings and laws that allow replacement hires for strikes, curb organizing in the workplace, ban secondary boycotts and swell the ranks of millions of workers excluded from basic U.S. labor law protection," writers Peter Speilmann, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Compa was in the news last week for his Human Rights Watch report on workers' rights health and safety abuses in the U.S. meatpacking industry, which New York Times reporter Stephen Greenhouse likened to violations documented in The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's muckracking exposé of the industry in 1905 (read related story).

In Workers' Rights as Human Rights, a book edited by Cornell ILR Professor James Gross, scholars, clergy, activists and labor relations practitioners make the case for such core rights as occupational safety and health on the job and offer innovative ideas for bringing U.S. labor laws into conformity with international human rights standards.

And while trade unions weren't always welcoming places for women workers, in United Apart: Gender and the Rise of craft Unionism ILR Associate Professor Ileen DeVault analyzes 40 U.S. strikes in the tobacco, textile, clothing and boot and shoe industries from 1886 to 1903 and finds that women and men worked interdependently and cooperatively in those early days of trade unionism to gain workers' advances for both sexes.