Global Justice and International Labour Rights

Despite the growing global consensus regarding the need to ensure minimal labour standards, such as adequate safety and health conditions, freedom of association, and the prohibition of child labour, millions of workers across the world continue to work in horrific conditions. Who should be held responsible, both morally and legally, for protecting workers' rights? What moral and legal obligations should individuals and institutions bear towards foreign workers in their countries? Is there any democratic way to generate, regulate, and enforce labour standards in a global labour market? This book addresses these questions by taking a fresh look at the normative assumptions underlying existing and proposed international labour regulations. By focusing on international labour as a particular sphere of justice, it seeks to advance both the contemporary philosophical debate on global justice and the legal scholarship on international labour.

1. Introduction Yossi Dahan, Hanna Lerner and Faina Milman-Sivan; Part I. Justice in a Global Labour Market: Philosophical Foundations: 2. Global labour injustice: a critical overview Miriam Ronzoni; 3. Global labour rights as duties of justice Yossi Dahan, Hanna Lerner and Faina Milman-Sivan; 4. How should we conceive of individual consumer responsibility to address labour injustices? Christian Barry and Kate Macdonald; Part II. International Labour Law as a Sphere of Justice: 5. Justice in a globalizing world: resolving conflicts between workers' rights beyond the nation state Judy Fudge and Guy Mundlak; 6. Union responsibility to migrant workers: a global justice approach Einat Albin; 7. The narrative of global justice and the grammar of law Brian Langille; 8. To what duties do global labour rights correlate?: responsibility for labour standards down the production chain Alan Hyde; Part III. Global Governance, Democracy and International Labour: 9. Institutional change in transnational labour governance: implementing social standards in public procurement and export credit guarantees Anke Hassel and Nicole Helmerich; 10. Democratic management and international labour rights Carol C. Gould.

This multi-perspective analysis of the normative implications of international labour regulations bridges the disciplinary gap between two areas of study that are rarely discussed in tandem: the normative-philosophical discussion on global justice and the empirical-legal study of international labour law.

Yossi Dahan is an associate professor of law at the College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan, Israel, where he is also the Director of the human rights program.
Hanna Lerner is a senior lecturer in political science at Tel-Aviv University. She is the author of Making Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge, 2011).
Faina Milman-Sivan is a senior lecturer at the Law Faculty at the University of Haifa, Israel.