This symposium, which included an international cast of participants, was designed to connect practitioners, activists, and scholars from various disciplinary settings to explore the meanings and significances of workers’ rights in a global perspective and strategies to defend them. The intent was to combine the two sides of a larger examination of this multifaceted topic. First, through discussion about the workers’ rights language, including its moral, legal, and philosophical genesis. Second, by an examination of the question of how best to defend these rights in global supply chains, with an exploration of state, inter-state, and non-state approaches.

The forces of globalization are often thought to produce a race to the bottom as companies the world over seek to reduce labor costs in the name of greater profitability.  As part of their cost-cutting endeavors, legal protections for workers are often interpreted as too expensive and too cumbersome.  Is it possible to offer a counter-argument via the notion of workers’ rights? What is the current state of support for the rights of workers, including the right to the realization of a safe and healthy workplace, the right to join labor unions and to bargain collectively, the right for protections against racial, ethnic, or gender discriminations, and the right to social security?  Our hope is that the ideas explored in this manner can help drive change.

Participants assessed the influence of institutions and associations created to support the rights of laborers and to endorse broad social responsibility. They included governmental approaches such as new initiatives of the U.S. Department of Labor; inter-governmental approaches such as worker rights clauses in trade agreements and the on-going efforts of the International Labor Organization; and the efforts of non-governmental organizations such as the Worker Rights Consortium and its Designated Suppliers Program. Participants also explored activists’ strategies such as United Students Against Sweatshop (USAS) efforts to push Russell to accept unionization in Honduras and Nike to pay severance.

Key issues the symposium explored included:

• • The value of worker solidarity, collective action of workers, and other forms of social activism in support of workers’ rights

• • The ways in which either states or civil society have held business accountable through an evaluation of value and supply chains and the regulation of financial investments

• • Efforts to revise trade agreements, including ongoing attempts to make the international enforcement of labor standards part of the system of global trade

• • The evaluation of interactions between national governments and global institutions and their impact on labor standards and conditions for fair and equitable economic growth.