Structural Injustice and Workers' Rights

Structural Injustice and Workers' Rights PDF Author: Virginia Mantouvalou
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192857150
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
When discussing exploitation in workplaces, governments typically deploy a rhetoric of personal responsibility: they place attention on employers who take advantage of workers, or on workers who choose non-standard, precarious work arrangements. On this account, the responsibility of the state is to address the harm inflicted by private actors. This book questions that approach and develops the concept of 'state-mediated structural injustice at work': a phenomenon which manifests when legislation that has an appearance of legitimacy, in fact has very damaging effects for large numbers of people and results in structures of exploitation at work. Using a series of examples such as migrant workers, captive workers, people under welfare conditionality schemes, and other precarious workers, Mantouvalou shows how the law creates these structures of injustice, entrenching long-term, standard, and routine exploitation. She also assesses these examples against human rights principles, including civil, political, economic, and social rights. The ultimate aim of the work is to show that these structures routinely lead to workers' exploitation which may in turn give rise to state responsibility for human rights violations and to argue that there is a pressing need for reform.

Structural Injustice and Workers' Rights

Structural Injustice and Workers' Rights PDF Author: Virginia Mantouvalou
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192857150
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
When discussing exploitation in workplaces, governments typically deploy a rhetoric of personal responsibility: they place attention on employers who take advantage of workers, or on workers who choose non-standard, precarious work arrangements. On this account, the responsibility of the state is to address the harm inflicted by private actors. This book questions that approach and develops the concept of 'state-mediated structural injustice at work': a phenomenon which manifests when legislation that has an appearance of legitimacy, in fact has very damaging effects for large numbers of people and results in structures of exploitation at work. Using a series of examples such as migrant workers, captive workers, people under welfare conditionality schemes, and other precarious workers, Mantouvalou shows how the law creates these structures of injustice, entrenching long-term, standard, and routine exploitation. She also assesses these examples against human rights principles, including civil, political, economic, and social rights. The ultimate aim of the work is to show that these structures routinely lead to workers' exploitation which may in turn give rise to state responsibility for human rights violations and to argue that there is a pressing need for reform.

Structural Injustice and the Human Rights of Workers

Structural Injustice and the Human Rights of Workers PDF Author: Virginia Mantouvalou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
An increasing number of jobs are precarious, making workers vulnerable to various forms of ill-treatment and exploitation. The UK Government's main approach has been to criminalise the actions of unscrupulous employers who seek to exploit these. This approach, however, has been ineffective, partly because it ignores the broader socio-economic structures that place workers in conditions of vulnerability. This article develops an alternative solution, seeking to identify structures that force and trap workers in conditions of exploitation. It focuses specifically on what I call 'state-mediated structural injustice', where legislative schemes that promote otherwise legitimate aims create vulnerabilities that force and trap workers in conditions of exploitation. I use examples such as restrictive visa regimes, welfare conditionality programmes, and zero-hour contracts to illustrate the unjust structures. I finally assess whether these legal structures are compatible with human rights, such as the right to private life, the prohibition of slavery, servitude, forced and compulsory labour, and the right to fair and just working conditions, and make proposals for legal reform.

Structural Injustice

Structural Injustice PDF Author: Madison Powers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190053992
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Madison Powers and Ruth Faden here develop an innovative theory of structural injustice that links human rights norms and fairness norms. Norms of both kinds are grounded in an account of well-being. Their well-being account provides the foundation for human rights, explains the depth of unfairness of systematic patterns of disadvantage, and locates the unfairness of power relations in forms of control some groups have over the well-being of other groups. They explain how human rights violations and structurally unfair patterns of power and advantage are so often interconnected. Unlike theories of structural injustice tailored for largely benign social processes, Powers and Faden's theory addresses typical patterns of structural injustice-those in which the wrongful conduct of identifiable agents creates or sustains mutually reinforcing forms of injustice. These patterns exist both within nation-states and across national boundaries. However, this theory rejects the claim that for a structural theory to be broadly applicable both within and across national boundaries its central claims must be universally endorsable. Instead, Powers and Faden find support for their theory in examples of structural injustice around the world, and in the insights and perspectives of related social movements. Their theory also differs from approaches that make enhanced democratic decision-making or the global extension of republican institutions the centerpiece of proposed remedies. Instead, the theory focuses on justifiable forms of resistance in circumstances in which institutions are unwilling or unable to address pressing problems of injustice. The insights developed in Structural Injustice will interest not only scholars and students in a range of disciplines from political philosophy to feminist theory and environmental justice, but also activists and journalists engaged with issues of social justice.

What Is Structural Injustice?

What Is Structural Injustice? PDF Author: Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies Jude Browne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019889287X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
What is Structural Injustice? is the first edited collection to bring together the voices of leading structural injustice scholars to provide an overview of this profoundly important concept. The volume features specially selected original and essential works on structural injustice, providing a range of disciplinary, ontological, and epistemological perspectives on what structural injustice is, and includes feminist and post-colonial theories to interrogate how structural injustice exacerbates and reproduces existing inequalities and relations of power. This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

With Power Comes Responsibility

With Power Comes Responsibility PDF Author: Maeve McKeown
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350195790
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
What is structural injustice, and who ultimately bears responsibility for it? In answering these questions Maeve McKeown goes beyond the widely accepted narrative of unintended consequences and blameless participation to explain how power and responsibility truly function in today's world. Drawing on case studies from sweatshops to climate change, McKeown identifies three types of structural injustice: the pure and unintended accumulation of disparate activities; the avoidable injustice that could be ameliorated by the powerful but nevertheless continues; the deliberate perpetuation of structural processes that benefit powerful political and economic agents. In each of these, the role of power is different which changes the allocation of responsibility. From this understanding, we can shape a deeper, more sophisticated idea of how structural injustice operates and what we as individuals can do about it. What is the political responsibility of ordinary individuals? How can ordinary individuals with very little power pressure morally responsible, powerful agents to address structural injustice? Do we have the same responsibility for historical injustice as we do for that which we see in today's world? This is fundamental reassessment of the relationship between power, ordinary people and responsibility for structural injustice.

Human Rights and Structural Adjustment

Human Rights and Structural Adjustment PDF Author: M. Rodwan Abouharb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139465961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
'Structural adjustment' has been a central part of the development strategy for the 'third world'. Loans made by the World Bank and the IMF have been conditional on developing countries pursuing rapid economic liberalization programmes as it was believed this would strengthen their economies in the long run. M. Rodwan Abouharb and David Cingranelli argue that, conversely, structural adjustment agreements usually cause increased hardship for the poor, greater civil conflict, and more repression of human rights, therefore resulting in a lower rate of economic development. Greater exposure to structural adjustment has increased the prevalence of anti-government protests, riots and rebellion. It has led to less respect for economic and social rights, physical integrity rights, and worker rights, but more respect for democratic rights. Based on these findings, the authors recommend a human rights-based approach to economic development.

When Misfortune Becomes Injustice

When Misfortune Becomes Injustice PDF Author: Alicia Ely Yamin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503635953
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
When Misfortune Becomes Injustice surveys the progress and challenges in deploying human rights to advance health and social equality over recent decades. Alicia Ely Yamin weaves together theory and firsthand experience in a compelling narrative of how evolving legal norms, empirical knowledge, and development paradigms have interacted in the realization of health rights, and challenges us to consider why these advances have failed to produce greater equality within and between nations. In this revised and expanded second edition, Yamin incorporates crucial lessons learned about the state of global health equity and public health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating just how incompatible the current institutionalized world order—based on neoliberal, financialized capitalism—is with one in which the rights of diverse people around the globe can be realized. COVID-19 struck a world that had been shaped by decades of disinvestment in public health, health systems, and social protection, as well as privatization of wealth and gaping social inequalities within and between countries, and the evident crisis of confidence in the capacity of democratic political institutions and global governance was deepened by the pandemic. Yamin argues that transformative human rights praxis in health calls for addressing issues of structural inequality and political economy, and working across disciplinary silos through networks and social movements.

Just Responsibility

Just Responsibility PDF Author: Brooke A. Ackerly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019066293X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
It has been well-established that many of the injustices that people around the world experience every day, from food insecurity to unsafe labor conditions and natural disasters, are the result of wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? In one sense, we answer this question when we buy the local homeless street newspaper, decide where to buy our clothes, remember our reusable bags when we shop, donate to disaster relief, or send letters to corporations about labor rights. But given the global scale of injustices related to poverty, environmental change, gender, and labor, can these individual acts really impact the seemingly intractable global social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate and exacerbate them? Moreover, can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly both answers the question of what should we do, and shows that it's the wrong question to ask. To ask the right question, we need to ground our normative theory of global justice in the lived experience of injustice. Using a feminist critical methodology, she argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice, regardless of our causal responsibility and extent of our knowledge of the injustice. Furthermore, it is a matter that needs to be guided by principles of human rights. As she argues, while many understand human rights as political goals or entitlements, they can also guide political strategy. Her aims are twofold: to present a theory of what it means to take responsibility for injustice and for ensuring human rights, as well as to develop a guide for how to take responsibility in ways that support local and global movements for transformative politics. In order to illustrate her theory and guide for action, Ackerly draws on fieldwork on the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, the food crisis of 2008, and strategies from 125 activist organizations working on women's and labor rights across 26 countries. Just Responsibility integrates these ways of taking political responsibility into a rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the fabric of political life.

Human Rights in Our Own Backyard

Human Rights in Our Own Backyard PDF Author: William T. Armaline
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205146
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Most Americans assume that the United States provides a gold standard for human rights—a 2007 survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believed that "the U.S. does a better job than most countries when it comes to protecting human rights." As well, discussions among scholars and public officials in the United States frame human rights issues as concerning people, policies, or practices "over there." By contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that many of the greatest immediate and structural threats to human rights, and some of the most significant efforts to realize human rights in practice, can be found in our own backyard. Human Rights in Our Own Backyard examines the state of human rights and responses to human rights issues, drawing on sociological literature and perspectives to interrogate assumptions of American exceptionalism. How do people in the U.S. address human rights issues? What strategies have they adopted, and how successful have these strategies been? Essays are organized around key conventions of human rights, focusing on the relationships between human rights and justice, the state and the individual, civil rights and human rights, and group rights versus individual rights. The contributors are united by a common conception of the human rights enterprise as a process involving not only state-defined and implemented rights but also human rights from below as promoted by activists.

Social Work, Social Justice & Human Rights

Social Work, Social Justice & Human Rights PDF Author: Colleen Lundy
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144260039X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The second edition of this popular social work practice text more fully addresses the connection between social justice and human rights.