‘Labor Rights Are Human Rights’: An Interview with Maina Kiai, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association

Although the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association among its thirty articles, more than sixty years elapsed before working people’s rights to form unions and assemble was accorded attention by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The omission of worker rights’ issues reflects a global international perspective that historically has not embraced workplace rights within the larger human rights framework. The UNHRC’s appointment of a Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in 2011 marked a noteworthy step in broadening the dialogue. Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai has strongly argued that a first step toward addressing the harsh effects of globalization on millions of workers around the world begins with the eradication of the artificial distinction between labor rights and human rights. As Special Rapporteur, Kiai has underscored the centrality of the global working class, and argued that the ability of the working class to exercise fundamental workplace rights is a prerequisite for a broad range of other rights, whether economic, social, cultural or political.</jats:p

‘Labor Rights Are Human Rights’: An Interview with Maina Kiai, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association

Although the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association among its thirty articles, more than sixty years elapsed before working people’s rights to form unions and assemble was accorded attention by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The omission of worker rights’ issues reflects a global international perspective that historically has not embraced workplace rights within the larger human rights framework. The UNHRC’s appointment of a Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in 2011 marked a noteworthy step in broadening the dialogue. Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai has strongly argued that a first step toward addressing the harsh effects of globalization on millions of workers around the world begins with the eradication of the artificial distinction between labor rights and human rights. As Special Rapporteur, Kiai has underscored the centrality of the global working class, and argued that the ability of the working class to exercise fundamental workplace rights is a prerequisite for a broad range of other rights, whether economic, social, cultural or political

1950s Milwaukee

Overwhelmingly white and middle class, Milwaukee in the 1950s stood at the brink of rapid demographic change as thousands of African Americans from the U.S. South migrated to the city. From 1950 to 1960, Milwaukee’s black population grew from 21,772 to 62,458, a 187 percent increase that alarmed many white residents and provided fuel for a race-baiting mayoral campaign against the city’s liberal mayor in 1956. But even as the new residents challenged long-held notions of white privilege, their arrival also was not uniformly welcomed by the city’s longtime middle- and upper middle-class African American residents, whose classist perspective often aligned with white municipal lawmakers and community and labor leaders. The increased number of low-income African American migrants living in Milwaukee brought into sharp relief the inability of all black Milwaukeeans to secure jobs and decent housing. Furthermore, African American job seekers found little recourse in the local labor movement, with union leaders and members mirroring the city’s sociocultural biases. African American migrants faced a combination of racial discrimination and class-based bias built on perceptions that all black migrants were lower skilled, low-income workers who did not fit into the city’s “culture,” a euphemism frequently employed to reference “class.” This article examines how the response of labor, lawmakers, and the community in 1950s Milwaukee, like Detroit and Chicago in earlier years, set the direction for decades to come. </jats:p

Frank Zeidler and the Conservative Challenge to Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee

Ph.D.With a tradition of progressivism, a highly unionized workforce and a socialist mayor, Milwaukee in the 1950s seemingly embodied the postwar liberal consensus that subscribed to a continuation of the New Deal order. Yet scholarly and popular interpretations of the 1950s that privilege social conformity or suggest a high level of political&ndasheconomic consensus reinforce a narrative that excludes serious analysis of the ideological ferment of conservatism beneath this superficial "consensus." Through an examination of the major challenges facing a midcentury urban mayor, Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler, this study explores how historical trends often documented at the national level&mdashthe reemergence of a conservative movement, the evolution from class politics to rights politics, the question of race, the struggle by public-sector employees to attain bargaining rights, the role of corporate&ndashled efforts to influence public opinion&mdashdeveloped at the local level. This study adds to recent findings of other scholars by showing that despite the widespread national acceptance of economic policies advanced in response to the Depression, conservatives staged a grassroots resurgence during the 1950s that went beyond the now well-documented intellectual movement of that time.Fueled first by opposition to government involvement in shaping economic priorities and by resistance to employee challenges for broader workplace rights, this response preceded and at times became indistinguishable from the race-based reaction identified by many scholars as launching the conservative movement in the 1960s. While recent scholarship has reconceptualized the 1950s as the genesis of the conservative response to civil rights issues, it has generally not focused on the extent to which this movement was driven by assertions of individual economic rights as paramount to that of the collective public good.Milwaukee, with its widely unionized workforce and tradition of progressivism, offers an example of the strength of this conservative reaction that, even in such an environment, succeeded in slowing or blocking publicly funded programs in the short run while sowing the seeds for future expansion of far more extreme grassroots conservatism

The Media Makes the Message

This chapter looks at how the city's fading foreign-language press and financially challenged labor media were offset by a vociferous conservative suburban press. Simultaneously, large mainstream media outlets began a notable ideological shift toward free market triumphalism, while the surge in far-right national broadcast media and print publications began reaching Milwaukee households. This chapter underlines how the spread of far-right media, far from spontaneous, was generated with the partnership of large corporate interests that privately financed such endeavors even as they publicly espoused support for New Deal principles. Although most corporations publicly remained moderate in their approach to issues such as public provision of social welfare programs and unionization, many joined with “fringe” groups to surreptitiously unravel the postwar New Deal economic order. As such, even businesses that seemingly had bought into commercial Keynesianism played a considerable part in the conservative backlash to the New Deal.</p