Human Rights and Economic Rights--Issues for Research and Action June K. Burton

37

Morally responsible socio-economists are now presented with a unique

opportunity to contribute to the value c lar i f icat ion of the developing

planetary culture and shaping contemporary national and international policy

by investigating and taking an informed, positive stand on human rights

issues, especially those relating to economic problems. Several areas of

concern where sound research and opinion could benefit policy makers and

inform conscientious voters by elucidating confused and fuzzy thinking or

eliminating general ignorance come to mind. These and some ideas relating

to economic education are br ief ly suggested below in an effort , hopefully,

to provoke thought and action.

During the summer of 1977 public debate occurred over continued United

States participation in the International Labor Organization (ILO). Super-

f i c i a l l y at least, the timing makes i t seem curious, i f not hypocritical,

for the U.S. to consider withdrawal from the ILO. This international organi-

zation has not the best but the only real track record in monitoring human

rights of workers. Outside of the United Nations the ILO has been an advocate

of safety in the work place. Moreover, the l i s t of major ILO instruments and

documents concerning women workers alone runs to six pages or more. Never-

theless, careful, unbiased studies of the ILO could put i ts work into historical

and pol i t ical focus and perhaps, weigh the value of i ts work in comparison

to the other alternatives which existed at each instance. The average American

knows so l i t t l e about the ILO that intel l igent judgment about i ts present

and future usefulness could easily be manipulated.

An exceedingly complex human rights problem which is just beginning to

receive attention in this country is protection for the unborn. As was

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pointed out recently by James C. Hyatt,l the protection of the unborn is a

complicated work-safety issue affecting both men and women in the labor force

and sometimes even the wives of male workers. The U.S. Labor Department hBs

already become involved in industries processing products made from lead.

Its efforts to cope with potential danger to the fetus may be turned into

a transnational problem i f manufacturers decide to circumvent the intentions

of safety regulations by moving plants outside of federal jur isdict ion, i .e.

to less developed countries which are wi l l ing to trade off potential popu-

lation damage for short-range economic advantages. Other human rights are

involved as well, notably women's rights to equal work and pay and the r ight

to privacy. Aside from inhalation and contact with unhealthy materials and

gases, protection of the unborn relates to economic rights when we consider

maternity benefits, health services, or the lack of these, in addition to

inadequate diet for pregnant women in many countries. The implications of

this problem considered against future technological and scient i f ic develop-

ment involving radio-active and toxic substances is staggering.

Since 1978 has been designated as the Year of the Child by the United

Nations, i t would be highly appropriate to study future prospects for the

unborn and for physically and mentally damaged children in an economic, social

and moral context. Comparative studies would be quite useful i f socio-

economists who are area specialists became interested in a cooperative venture

and might add pressure to now feeble efforts to establish an independent

international monitoring agency to report to regional and world pol i t ical

organizations. International humanitarian law should be extended to protect

the unborn although talk of cloning, multiple parenthood, genetic engineering,

sperm banking, and the production of sub-humans or man-animals for menial

labor make prospects for protecting the unborn child seem gloomy. 2

39 Another economic policy perennially under discussion in the U.S. and

elsewhere is the concept of a "minimum wage." Big labor union leaders

usually get their pictures in the newspapers each time they demand that the

minimum wage be increased. Politicians receive special press coverage

whenever compromise is attempted by excluding the coverage of young or

old people from a b i l l . What is disturbing about all the attention paid

to the minimum raise or to raising i t is the pretense that economic justice

is being granted to everyone in society and with the increase i t wi l l

thereby be further enhanced. Yet this cannot be the case when we all know

people who do not pay the minimum wage to their employees. How wi l l

raising the minimum wage to $2.65 or $3.00 an hour help secure economic

justice for the family of the woman babysitting who earns $40.00 for a

forty-f ive hour week? I t remains to be proven how the raising of the minimum

wage wi l l increase her income equally as much in i ts wake instead of widening

the gap further. Concerned socio-economists might be the proper persons to

advise lawmakers how to enforce what was supposed to be a fact years ago.

How does enforcement of the minimum wage and the extension of i ts applica-

b i l i t y relate to the restructuring of state and national welfare systems?

Research by independent social scientists on the effects on the entire

economy of enforcing minimum wage standards possibly could provide more

reliable yardsticks by which to compare the work of government agencies

to whom violators of wage laws and their unfortunate victims--the poor--

are not about to divulge accurate information for stat ist ical purposes. The

union leader who deserves to be photographed is the more a l t ru is t ic one who

demands enforcement of the minimum wage for everybody regardless of age,

sex, race, nationality, or union membership.

40

An aspect of international human rights which receives too much credence

is the line that histor ical ly Socialist countries and their leaders always

have stood for the attainment of economic rights while non-socialist countries

and Western philosophers have only been concerned about the guaranteeing

of c iv i l and pol i t ical rights. This has been repeated so frequently that

Westerners seem to believe i t . While there is l i t t l e purpose in stal l ing

progress toward eliminating human rights violations by such exchanges of

accusations at international negotiating sessions, there could be value in

educating Western people more about their heritage which includes belief

in economic rights. In fact, an examination of the past shows that the

eighteenth-century philosophers, who created the revolutionary tradit ion

from which the idea of popular sovereignty spread to engulf the entire

Western world from the Urals to the Alleghenies during the period 1776 to

1917, were indeed concerned with economic rights as much as those latecomers

on the post-industrial revolution scene--Karl Marx and Lenin. The Baron de

Montesquieu and French Physiocrats wrote about the right to work and the

right to social security 3 years before the Revolution of 1789 and almost a

century before Marxist ideology was even a possibi l i ty. Nor should the

contribution of creating the f i r s t social security system by that so-called

archconservative Otto yon Bismarck be forgotten. More awareness of our

common heritage and shared traditions before and after the 1850s would be

a preliminary step toward converging the interests of al l humankind in the

promotion of survival and the retention of humanness on this planet. We

should not expect people whose lives are controlled by total i tar ian regimes

to know the thingsthat we ourselves neglect to teach our own children,

namely economic history beginning in elementary school.

41 One of the grossest patterns of violations of human rights in recent

years has been established by the present mil i tary government in Chile,

however, nothing has been done effectively to correct the situation. Despite

Chilean denunciation of U.S. Congressional cr i t ics and activists and their

renunciation of the U.S. bilateral aid program during 1978, "the big money

wi l l continue to flow into Chile with the largest share provided by the

United States. ''4 Well-executed studies of the U.S. foreign assistance

program provide facts for the intel l igent reader and are praise-worthy con-

sidered for their intended purpose. Nevertheless, they have the same

weakness as history in that they factually describe what really happened

or is about to happen but fa i l to inform the reader about what would have

been the case had alternative courses of economic aid been pursued. People

could use that kind of projection as we11. This is not to suggest that

economists are or ought to be fortune-tellers, but laypersons could prof i t

occasionally from hearing their ideas about the "counter-factual history of

economics" as an antidote to the deterministic philosophy that is hurled

at people against their free w i l l . Regarding a human-rights situation as

deplorable as the Chile case, the worst attitude that world opinion can

formulate is accepting what is as inevitable. Tomorrow the same thing

could happen elsewhere; is that inevitable?

When the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 was formulated, one

of the important rights included was the right to own property. In both

the Jacobin Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1793 and the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 this right was specifically maintained.

Now, however, in the two covenants ( l - - c i v i l and pol i t ical rights and 2--

economic, social and cultural rights) that are meant to put the aspirations

of the Universal Declaration into effect, the right to property has been

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eliminated. May this omission be taken as a true indices of world oplnion

about the unimportance of owning property as a basic human right? Should

a movement be gotten underway for an additional instrument for the defense

of property rights? The omission, which obviously was caused by the pre-

dominant influence of socialist countries in the United Nations, has the

potential of becoming international customary law i f i t is casually accepted.

I f President Carter follows through on his announced intention of accepting

the two covenants, there wi l l be an ideal opportunity at the time of the

Senate debates to call attention to the seeming disappearance of the right

to property. I f the tables were turned and the nations of the world were

ratifying the reverse--the defense of private property, Marxist economists

would surely make a great noise about i t .

Another aspect of economic rights that is not a result of unfair wage

treatment but which is nonetheless important is the concept of consumer

rights. Among the results of pressure exerted by some notable economists

as consumer advocates was the creation in 1973 of the U.S. Consumer Product

Safety Commission (CPSC) with an annual budget in the area of $40 mill ion.

That the commission has worked out standards for about f i f t y products is

an indication of how costly and complicated the procedures i t follows are. 5

An independent study of the CPSC's work during its f i r s t five years of

existence might provide the needed insight to give i t more momentum in the

years ahead or possibly even reveal the activit ies of whatever lobbies may

have been involved in the compromises between production costs and safety

that were reached by the agency working with the involved industries. Such

a study might also make a judgment about whether being protected by the

government is really worth the cost to consumers who must ultimately pay

for i t acting in their capacity as taxpayers. The logical conclusion might

43 be that the CPSC ought to handle some dangerous product lines because i t can

do this to public advantage but that preliminary studies should indicate

to them that overly complex or baffling design problems are best lef t alone

until technologists are able to solve them.

Before closing, an attempt to add some unity to the above randomly

presented themes is in order. Any of the above, all of them, or a combina-

tion of these and additional economic themes relating to international

human rights could be incorporated into formal higher, education offerings

in a variety of ways--as special topics courses, interdisciplinary general

education courses for freshmen and sophomores, senior or graduate student

reading and research seminars, alternate futures courses, or peace studies

programs. The overwhelming task of teaching human rights has been le f t

too long to lawyers and political scientists. Experts in other related

academic disciplines have a real contribution to make to broadening know-

ledge and inst i l l ing responsibility in order that the curse of aliveness

for the world's poor may one day be replaced by the realization of l i fe 's

promised blessings for all humankind. Only professorial indifference pre-

cludes teaching about human rights and economic rights on any campus

regardless of the institution's structure and financial exigencies.

44 NOTES

l"Early Warning," The Wall Street Journal. August 2, 1977, pp. 1 and 31.

2An excerpt from Vance Packard's forthcoming, fal l book The People Shapers, to be published by L i t t le , Brown and Company, appeared in The Saturday Review, August 6/20, 1977, pp. 33-48. Packard provides a ~T~-turbingly provocative discussion of research in these areas.

3See: Ren~ Cassin, La Pens6e et l'Action. (Boulogne-sur-Seine: Editions F. Lalou, 1972), pp. 89-95 and Vincent Marcaggi, Les Origines de la D~claration des Droits de l'Homme de 1789. (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, Editeur, 1904}, pp. 109-11.

4"Human Rights and the U.S. Foreign Assistance Program. Fiscal Year 1978. Part l--Latin America." (Washington, D.C.: Center for International Policy, 1977), p. 45.

5Frederick C. Klein, "Setting Safety Rules for Product Proves Costly and Complicated," The Wall Street Journal. August I I , 1977, pp. l and 14. Klein describes the process the CPSC entered into with the ladder industry.