The Promise of Economic Rights and the Welfare State

Labour Left Out: Canada's Failure to Protect and Promote Collective Bargaining as a Human Right. By Roy Adams. Ottawa: Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, 2006. The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy. By Christopher Howard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Economic Rights Canada and United States. Edited by Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Claude E. Welch Jr. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] The International Bill of Rights, which includes Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966), and International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966), embodies a wide range of human rights. The universalism, interdependency, and indivisibility of these have been reaffirmed at World Conferences on Human Rights, organized by United Nations (U.N.) and held Teheran (1968) and Vienna (1993), and various U.N. resolutions. Yet, there has been resistance to accepting full scope of human articulated international documents, and civil and have been privileged. Economic, social and labor tend to take a back seat international discourse many countries, including Western democratic states that often present themselves as flagship of human rights. A widely shared belief is that international human are a product of Western culture and philosophies, although counter-arguments and evidence have been compelling (Arat 2006a). Some scholars not trace origin of human to Western liberal tradition, but also claim that liberal social democratic regimes reinforced by welfare policies are compatible with human (Howard and Donnelly 1986; Donnelly 1989; Howard 1995). Their arguments, of course, are based on evolution of liberal theory and changes function of liberal, Western societies. As Liberalism has evolved to become a more inclusive and less discriminatory theory, liberal democratic states advanced industrial countries became welfare states that have been relatively more successful realizing several social and economic for large segments of their population. Writing mid-twentieth century, students of Europe pointed to a gradual rise and recognition of certain rights. For example, T. H. Marshall noted that it is possible without doing much violence to historical accuracy, to assign formative period life of each [category of rights] to a different century--civil to eighteenth, to nineteenth and social to twentieth. These periods must, of course, be treated with reasonable elasticity, and there is some evident overlap, especially between last two (1964: 74). Similarly, Seymour Martin Lipset identified major issues encountered Western societies as place of religious institutions society, extending citizenship to lower strata, and distribution of national wealth. He noted that religious fought through and solved most of Protestant nations Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and citizenship, or political rights, was resolved in various ways around Twentieth Century, and only key domestic issue still waiting to be resolved (in post-World War II era) was collective bargaining over differences division of total product within framework of a Keynesian welfare state (1959: 92-100). What these scholars observed as an unfolding process is now considered complete by some of our contemporaries. For example, Jack Donnelly argues that the welfare has largely ended controversy over idea of economic and social rights (1989: 30-31). According to Donnelly, the West has been pretty successful, not merely comparatively but absolutely, progressively implementing economic and social rights (2005: 1). …

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