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

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.

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.

Welfare-to-Work, Structural Injustice, and Human Rights

Welfare-to-Work, Structural Injustice, and Human Rights PDF Author: Virginia Mantouvalou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This article discusses welfare-to-work schemes, places schemes with strict conditionality in the theoretical framework of structural injustice, and argues that they may violate human rights law. Welfare-to-work schemes are schemes that impose obligations on individuals to seek and accept work on the basis that otherwise they will be sanctioned by losing access to social support. The schemes are often presented as the best route out of poverty. However, the system in the UK, characterised by strict conditionality, has ended up coercing those who are poor and disadvantaged into precarious work, and conditions of in-work poverty. Because schemes with strict conditionality force people to work in these conditions, structures of exploitation are created and sustained, becoming widespread and routine. The article further situates the problem in the theoretical framework of structural injustice, and argues that a framework of 'state-mediated structural injustice' is the best way of explaining the wrong. It finally claims that this injustice violates principles that are enshrined in human rights law, which the authorities have an obligation to examine and address.

Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics

Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics PDF Author: Catherine Lu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108420117
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book examines how justice and reconciliation in world politics should be conceived in response to the injustice and alienation of modern colonialism?

Global Justice and International Labour Rights

Global Justice and International Labour Rights PDF Author: Yossi Dahan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107087872
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Presents innovative perspectives on the moral and legal obligations of individuals and institutions toward workers in the global era.

Responsibility for Justice

Responsibility for Justice PDF Author: Iris Marion Young
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019988935X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. Young argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which she calls the "social connection" model. She develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live. With a foreward by Martha C. Nussbaum, this last statement by a revered and highly influential thinker will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers, ethicists, and feminist and political philosophers.

Enduring Injustice

Enduring Injustice PDF Author: Jeff Spinner-Halev
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107017513
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Argues that understanding the impact of past injustices faced by some peoples can help us understand and overcome injustice today.

What is Structural Injustice?

What is Structural Injustice? PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198892896
Category : Political Science
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.

Not Enough

Not Enough PDF Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067498482X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.” —George Soros The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice. Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality. “Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse... Sure to provoke a wider discussion.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana... Consistently bracing.” —Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books “Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal... [A] tour de force.” —Los Angeles Review of Books