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New Moves in Transnational Advocacy: Getting Labor and Economic Rights on the Agenda in Unexpected Ways
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OVERVIEW. When well-meaning American activists sought to eliminate child
labor in Bangladesh’s garment industry in the early 1990s, they initially met not with cheers from local nongovernmental organizations in that country, but with cries of alarm. Some groups in Bangladesh even sought to launch a counter-campaign. Around the same time, when a leading New York-based human rights NGO launched a campaign againstgender discrimination in the Mexican workplace, some local Mexican groups participated directly – while others waged their own, parallel campaign on separate but related issues. Why the varied responses? What do they reveal about the ways different actors perceived the human rights at stake? Did such cross-currents in human rights advocacy lead to broader protection and promotion of human rights, or not?
Two mechanisms
1
developed in this article – blocking and backdoor moves – help
explain how activists maneuvered labor and economic rights concerns onto the mainstream human rights agenda in the 1990s. Unlike what much of the literature on norms evolution anticipates, labor and economic rights as norms have begun to (re)“emerge”
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in popular advocacy through a process fraught with differences of opinion
among activists themselves over the nature of rights and the best way to protect and promote them. And unlike what literature on transnational advocacy anticipates, proponents of new thinking on human rights have not always been on the “sending end” of campaigns. They have often been on the “receiving end.”
In the 1990s, with the dawning of the post-Cold War era and the burgeoning of
new forms of communications and cheaper and faster modes of travel, people collaborated on cross-border human rights campaigns as never before. Labor and economic rights questions gained prominence not because traditional human rights groups based in industrialized countries emphasized them. Rather, union activists along with groups involved in more general social justice advocacy and developing country activists together moved these issues to the forefront of campaigns such as thosereferenced above. By calling attention to gross abuses of labor rights in the workplace
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Mechanisms are widely defined. James Mahoney’s review essay cites 24 separate definitions; see
“Beyond Correlational Analysis: Recent Innovations in Theory and Method,” Sociological Forum 16, no. 3 (September 2001): 575-593. Robert Merton defines mechanisms as “social processes having designated consequences for designated parts of the social structure.” They are the “elementary building blocks of middle-range theories.” Robert K. Merton, “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 43-44, cited in Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, The Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24-25. See also Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg, “Social Mechanisms,” Acta Sociologica 39, No. 3 (1996): 281-308, especially p. 283.
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Activism on labor and economic rights is by no means a wholly new phenomenon. For historical analysis
see: Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 41-51. Andrew Ross, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers (London: Verso, 1997), 10-18 and in Eric Foner, editor, The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 240-245. Upendra Baxi, “The Development of the Right to Development,” in Janusz Symonides, editor, Human Rights: New Dimensionsand Challenges (Brookfield, MA: Ashgate, 1998), 99-116.
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| | Authors: Hertel, Shareen. |
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2
OVERVIEW. When well-meaning American activists sought to eliminate child
labor in Bangladesh’s garment industry in the early 1990s, they initially met not with
cheers from local nongovernmental organizations in that country, but with cries of alarm.
Some groups in Bangladesh even sought to launch a counter-campaign. Around the same
time, when a leading New York-based human rights NGO launched a campaign against
gender discrimination in the Mexican workplace, some local Mexican groups participated
directly – while others waged their own, parallel campaign on separate but related issues.
Why the varied responses? What do they reveal about the ways different actors perceived
the human rights at stake? Did such cross-currents in human rights advocacy lead to
broader protection and promotion of human rights, or not?
Two mechanisms
1
developed in this article – blocking and backdoor moves – help
explain how activists maneuvered labor and economic rights concerns onto the
mainstream human rights agenda in the 1990s. Unlike what much of the literature on
norms evolution anticipates, labor and economic rights as norms have begun to
(re)“emerge”
2
in popular advocacy through a process fraught with differences of opinion
among activists themselves over the nature of rights and the best way to protect and
promote them. And unlike what literature on transnational advocacy anticipates,
proponents of new thinking on human rights have not always been on the “sending end”
of campaigns. They have often been on the “receiving end.”
In the 1990s, with the dawning of the post-Cold War era and the burgeoning of
new forms of communications and cheaper and faster modes of travel, people
collaborated on cross-border human rights campaigns as never before. Labor and
economic rights questions gained prominence not because traditional human rights
groups based in industrialized countries emphasized them. Rather, union activists along
with groups involved in more general social justice advocacy and developing country
activists together moved these issues to the forefront of campaigns such as those
referenced above. By calling attention to gross abuses of labor rights in the workplace
1
Mechanisms are widely defined. James Mahoney’s review essay cites 24 separate definitions; see
“Beyond Correlational Analysis: Recent Innovations in Theory and Method,” Sociological Forum 16, no. 3
(September 2001): 575-593. Robert Merton defines mechanisms as “social processes having designated
consequences for designated parts of the social structure.” They are the “elementary building blocks of
middle-range theories.” Robert K. Merton, “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” in Social Theory and Social
Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 43-44, cited in Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles
Tilly, The Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24-25. See also
Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg, “Social Mechanisms,” Acta Sociologica 39, No. 3 (1996): 281-308,
especially p. 283.
2
Activism on labor and economic rights is by no means a wholly new phenomenon. For historical analysis
see: Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Transnational Advocacy Networks in
International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 41-51. Andrew Ross, No Sweat: Fashion,
Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers (London: Verso, 1997), 10-18 and in Eric Foner, editor,
The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 240-245. Upendra Baxi, “The
Development of the Right to Development,” in Janusz Symonides, editor, Human Rights: New Dimensions
and Challenges (Brookfield, MA: Ashgate, 1998), 99-116.
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