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Review Essay / Recension critique

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BlackettAdelleReview Essay / Recension critique, Global Justice and International Labour Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Adelle Blackett*
Affiliation:
Professor of Law & Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law and DevelopmentFaculty of Law, McGill [email protected]

Abstract

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Type
Review Essay / Recension critique
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association / Association Canadienne Droit et Société 2018 

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References

1 Dahan, Yossi, Lerner, Hanna, and Milman-Sivan, Faina, “Global Labour Rights as Duties of Justice,” in Global Justice and International Labour Rights, ed. Dahan, Yossa, Lerner, Hanna, and Miman-Sivan, Faina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar (citing Hugo Sinzheimer as cited in Kohler, Thomas C., “The Disintegration of Labor Law: Some Notes for a Comparative Study of Legal Transformation,” Notre Dame Law Review 73 (1998): 1322).Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 65.

3 One might have wondered, given the title, whether the book would turn in part on the distinction between “international labour rights” and “international labour law” or “international labour standards.” But the turn to rights discourse is not central to this book, which roots the global justice claim in labour connection and responsibility. For a recent, sustained critique of the turn to “rights,” see D’Souza, Radha, What’s Wrong with Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (London: Pluto Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Ronzoni, Miriam, “Global Labour Injustice: A Critical Overview,” in Global Justice.Google Scholar

5 Dahan, Yossi, Lerner, Hanna, and Milman-Sivan, Faina, “Global Justice, Labor Standards and Responsibility,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 12, no. 117 (2011): 111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Blackett, Adelle and Trebilcock, Anne, “Conceptualizing Transnational Labour Law,” in Research Handbook on Transnational Labour Law, ed. Blackett, and Trebilcock, , (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Young, Iris Marion, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 I sense a disconnect in Young’s posthumously published book with her attentiveness to deliberative democracy and the participation of historically disadvantaged groups in framing their own concerns in her earlier publications, Justice and the Politics of Difference as well as Inclusion and Democracy. Responsibility for Justice seems to offer stark, decontextualized pronouncements on why reparations are not owed for historical wrongs like slavery. Barry and Macdonald do not address that issue but grapple closely with some core assumptions in Responsibility for Justice, as well as with potential shortcomings to the social connections frame.

9 Boustany, Katia and Halde, Normand, “Mondialisation et mutations normatives : quelques réflexions en droit international,” in Mondialisation des échanges et fonctions de l’état, ed. Crépeau, François (Brussels: Bruylant, 1997), 37.Google Scholar

10 Barry, Christian and Macdonald, Kate, “How Should We Conceive of Individual Consumer Responsibility to Address Labour Injustices?” in Global Justice, 117.Google Scholar

11 Langille, Brian, “The Narrative of Global Justice and The Grammar of Law,” in Global Justice, 187.Google Scholar

12 Hyde, Alan, “To What Duties Do Global Labour Rights Correlate?: Responsibility for Labour Standards Down the Production Chain,” in Global Justice, 226.Google Scholar

13 Hassel, Anke and Helmerich, Nicole, “Institutional Change in Transnational Labour Governance: Implementing Social Standards in Public Procurement and Export Credit Guarantees,” in Global Justice, 183.Google Scholar

14 Hyde, Alan, “To What Duties Do Global Labour Rights Correlate?” in Global Justice, 227.Google Scholar

15 Ruggie, John G., “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 379415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).Google Scholar

17 See Robinson, Cedric J., Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: U. North Carolina Press, 2000);Google Scholar Hall, Stuart, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fraser, Nancy, “Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography – From Exploitation to Expropriation: Historic Geographies of Racialized Capitalism,” Economic Geography 94 (2017): 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 See Fraser, Nancy, “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi,” New Left Review 81, May–June (2013): 119132.Google Scholar

19 See e.g. Mégret, Frédéric, “Transnational Mobility, the International Law of Aliens, and the Origins of Global Migration Law,” American Journal of International Law Unbound, 14 (January 2017): 14Google Scholar (recalling that up until at least the middle of the 20th century, “a number of international lawyers, notably those operating through the Institut de droit international (IDI), advocated vigorously for a presumptive right to migrate” and if a prerogative existed, Mégret argues that it had to be weighed against another principle, namely that “humanity and justice require states to exercise that right whilst respecting, in ways that are compatible with their own security, the rights and liberties of aliens who seek to enter their territory, or who already find themselves there.”).

20 Amin, Samir, “Africa: Living on the Fringe,” Monthly Review 53, no. 10 (2002): 41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Ruggie, John G., “The United Nations and Globalization: Patterns and Limits of Institutional Adaptation,” Global Governance 9, no. 3 (2003): 301321;Google Scholar Fraser, “A Triple Movement?”, 119; Jayati Ghosh , “Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy, Part 1” (2017) Triple Crisis, first of a four part series on the “Costs of Empire,” available online.

22 Milanovic, Branko, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).Google Scholar

23 Therborn, Göran, “Dynamics of Inequality,” New Left Review 103, January-February (2017): 9.Google Scholar

24 Milanovic, Global Inequality, 125128.Google Scholar

25 Milanovic, Global Inequality, 128129 (invoking but insufficiently theorizing Franz Fanon; Milanovic’s analysis of postcolonial Africa is similarly laconic).Google Scholar

26 Therborn, “Dynamics of Inequality,” 17–19. Their critique of each other’s approaches to inequality is beyond the scope of this review. This literature needs to engage closely with the literature on racial capitalism. See n. 16.

27 Ronzoni, , “Global Labour Injustice: A Critical Overview,” in Global Justice, 29.Google Scholar

28 Gould, Carol C., “Democratic management and international labour rights,” in Global Justice, 266.Google Scholar

29 Unger, Roberto, Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 45.Google Scholar (“Of all the traits we habitually associate with the present existence of states as the natural setting of trade, none stands in greater apparent tension with the impulses that are supposed to justify market-based exchange in general and free trade in particular… than the limitation of the right of labor to cross national boundaries.”) Unger adds that the restraint on transnational labour mobility is not inherent to the existence of states.

30 Milanovic, , Global Inequality, 152–154, 139;Google Scholar Hepple, Bob, Labour Laws and Global Trade (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005) 5.Google Scholar

31 See World Bank, Workers in an Integrating World, World Development Report 1995.Google Scholar

32 Knox, Robert, “Law, Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Political Subjectivity: The Case of Organised Labour,” in Neoliberal Legality: Understanding the Role of Law in the Neoliberal Project, ed. Brabazon, Honor (London: Routledge, 2017), Chapter 5.Google Scholar

33 Milanovic, Global Inequality, 86.

34 Therborn, “Dynamics of Inequality,” 7.

35 Rodrik, Dani, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2018), 210211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Rodrik states plainly in his preface that the “reluctance to be honest about trade has cost economists their credibility with the public.” At xi). Rodrik also offers a careful discussion of the difficulties posed by free capital mobility, at 217–218. See also de Mestral, Armand, ed., Second Thoughts: Investor-State Arbitration between Developed Democracies (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press & CIGI, 2017).Google Scholar

36 Dahan, Lerner, and Milman-Sivan, Global justice, 174.

37 Streek, Wolfgang, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2016).Google Scholar

38 Ronzoni, “Global Labour Injustice,” in Global Justice, 46.

39 Ibid., 47.

40 Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).Google Scholar

41 Konings, Martijn, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015).Google Scholar

42 Fraser, Nancy, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

43 Blackett, Adelle, “Transnational Futures of International Labour Law” in Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law, ed. Zumbansen, Peer (forthcoming).Google Scholar

44 WT/DS399/AB/R. Decision given on September 5, 2011.

45 C-113/89 Rush Portuguesa [1990] ECR I-1417.

46 C-346/06 Rüffert [2008] ECR I-1989 (second Chamber).

47 Fudge, Judy and Mundlak, Guy, “Justice in a globalizing world,” in Global Justice, 124.Google Scholar

48 Corden, W. M., The Theory of Protection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).Google Scholar

49 Butler, Judith, “Trump is emancipating unbridled hatred,” Zeit Online, October 2016. http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-10/judith-butler-donald-trump-populism-interviewGoogle Scholar

50 I discuss this further in Adelle Blackett, “‘This is Hallowed Ground’: Canada and International Labour Law” (2018) CIGI Reflections Series Paper no. 22, available online.