Reimagining Workers' Human Rights: Transformative Organizing for a Socially Aware Global Economy

Authors

Dean Hubbard

Abstract

This article illustrates a strategy to reconceptualize workers' rights activism to achieve systematic transformation of the global political economy emphasizing the disproportionate toll of neo-liberal economics on women, poor people, and people of color. The first section demonstrates the way in which existing structures in international human rights law can work to provide a normative foundation to this goal. The second section emphasizes the essential next step toward reaching this transformation in what the author terms, Socially Aware Global Economy (SAGE) organizing. SAGE organizing first, reimagines the labor movement through grass roots, transnational organizing, second, revitalizes economic human rights law by incorporating legal work and transformative organizing, and third, facilitates popular participation in the construction of alternative institutions and policies. These elements provide a framework through which global workers may find courage, and egalitarian, popular-democratic, systemic economic, and political transformation is possible.

Recommended Citation

Dean Hubbard, Reimagining Workers' Human Rights: Transformative Organizing for a Socially Aware Global Economy, 5 Hastings Race & Poverty L.J. 1 (2008).
Available at: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_race_poverty_law_journal/vol5/iss1/1