Freedom of Association and the Right to Contest: Getting Back to Basics
As worker participation through trade unions has declined across much of the developed world, especially in the US, the UK and Canada, scholars and activists have turned to the concept of "freedom of association" (FOA) -- defined in international labour law as the fundamental right of workers to form and join trade unions of their own choosing -- as a basis for reclaiming a voice for workers in economic governance. Much of this work pursues what we call a strategy of ascent: to what extent does the existing FOA as defined in international and national labour law encompass constitutionalised rights to collective bargaining and to strike, for example? This chapter adopts instead a strategy of descent: does FOA both rest on and help to support more basic rights of concerted protest in the workplace as a prelude to, or even a substitute for, trade union organisation? Drawing upon Philip Pettit's philosophical work on freedom as non-domination, the chapter contends for the recognition of an individual right to contest employer power, free from both state and employer interference. This fundamental labour right, coupled with an associational right or freedom to do jointly with others what one has the right or freedom to do as individuals, provides a normative foundation for protecting informal concerted activity as well as the more familiar trade union forms of FOA. This chapter maps the specific configuration of labour rights in Canada, the UK and the US from this perspective, and identifies some newly-apparent gaps in both the law and the scholarly literature regarding fundamental labour rights.
Just the Facts: The Case for Workplace Transparency
In many areas of regulation, mandating disclosure of information about a firm’s products, services, production processes, or governance is said to improve the efficiency and rationality of market decisions, avoid fraud, and advance public regulatory goals, all without intruding significantly upon the autonomy of market actors. Yet the idea of regulating through information disclosure has made barely a cameo appearance in the field of labor and employment law. This article begins to fill that void. Mandatory disclosure is no panacea; it may be an overused policy tool in many areas. But in the law of work, mandatory disclosure can play a supportive role both within the ambit of existing substantive mandates and among the many terms and conditions that are above or beyond the reach of substantive mandates. Within the domain of mandatory legal rights or minimum terms, mandatory disclosure may help to improve compliance. Within the large domain that is left to private ordering, mandatory disclosure can improve the operation of labor markets by better informing employees’ choices among and bar-gains with employers. And where neither mandates nor markets meet public aspirations for more socially responsible, fair, and egalitarian workplaces, mandatory disclosure may help to press firms to reach beyond compliance by strengthening and broadening the factual foundation for the reputational rewards and sanctions that are an increasingly significant driver in organizational behavior.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1