James A. Gross argues that worker rights like the right to freedom of association at the workplace, the right to bargain collectively, and the right to a safe and healthy workplace are not typical public policy issues. If they were normal policy issues, reasonable people could disagree about the proper balance between what business owners and managers want and what workers want. Instead, these worker rights and others like them have a special status; they are internationally recognized human rights. Because they are human rights, every government of the world has a special obligation to protect them, to give them special preference even when full protection of worker rights is opposed by business owners and managers.
In this book and in previous books and articles spanning a long and distinguished career, Gross argues that there is a substantial gap between international human rights standards and labor standards in the United States. He contends that the government of the United States historically has not given any special preference to the protection of worker rights. In fact, he argues, the opposite is true. Legislators, executive branch agencies, judges, and labor arbitrators have given higher priority to the property rights and free speech rights of business owners. Furthermore, he adds, these deliberate choices by various government actors constitute violations of workers' human rights and crimes against humanity. Decisions made by US politicians, judges, and bureaucrats have “dehumanized workers and turned them into usable and disposable things” (p. 4). To make his case, Gross assesses various aspects of US labor relations—freedom of association, racial discrimination, management rights, workplace safety, and human resources—through the lens of internationally accepted human rights principles as standards of judgment.
As Gross notes himself, his book expresses a point of view. It is not disinterested scholarship. He does not even consider counterarguments, let alone consider them seriously. He notes, however, that in mainstream scholarship on industrial and labor relations and business management, the point of view he expresses in this book is rarely even acknowledged. Instead, books and courses on human resource management and organizational behavior focus on ways in which employers can control their employees. Traditionally, that control has been designed to get workers to be more efficient, disciplined, cheerfully obedient, and loyal (p. 160). It is not intended to allow workers to be free from domination and manipulation, which is what an adherence to the spirit of human rights would require (p. 190). The author believes that management “has no chance of getting the loyalty and effort they want from workers without recognizing and respecting workers' human rights, particularly workers' right of freedom of association” (p. 192). “By revealing how truly unacceptable management's ‘best practices’ can be when considered as human rights issues,” to quote from the publisher's website,” A Shameful Business encourages a bold new vision for workers, whether organized or not, that would signify a radical rethinking of social values and the concept of workplace rights and justice in the courtroom, the boardroom, and on the shop floor.”
Many of the arguments highlighted in the book about violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights (Chapters 4 and 5) were foreshadowed in the author's excellent previous book, Broken Promises: The Subversion of American Labor Relations Policy, 1947–1994 (1995). But the focus of that book was narrower, and Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of this new book summarize and update his earlier arguments about the subversion of the National Labor Relations Act mainly through federal court and NLRB decisions. Furthermore, this new work does an even better job of placing these decisions within a historical and philosophical context. Gross argues that the dominant philosophical context in the United States has always supported the unregulated market philosophy. But he notes that there have often been countermovements. He hopes for more successful countermovements in the future, seeing them as necessary for the future success of American society. The author's argument that worker rights should be considered human rights, not ordinary legal rights, is also familiar, but he extends his earlier views in this work to reflect his current thinking on the subject, especially in Chapter 9.
The material in Chapters 6 and 7 on the human and workers' right to a safe and healthy workplace is especially original. The International Labor Organization's (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work does not include the right to a safe and healthy workplace. Thus, there is a tendency to ignore this worker right in human rights analyses. However, as Gross convincingly argues in these chapters, the American worker's right to life has been sacrificed in the name of economic development and productivity. Workers in the United States are often forced to choose between risking their health and safety or quitting their jobs. He demonstrates that despite having what appears to be a strong law against employer abuse of this right, actual implementation of the law provides workers with little protection. These chapters also demonstrate the interdependence of all human rights, because the denial of workers' freedom of association and right to collectively bargain prevents workers from exercising more voice and control over the safety of their workplaces.
The first and last chapters of the book do a good job of explaining why one should consider most worker rights as human rights. Gross explains that the work-related rights discussed in his book are also included in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The affirmation of these rights in this and other international human rights instruments expresses the idea that human labor is not a commodity to be exploited or bought at the lowest possible price. Articles 23 and 24 acknowledge the human rights: to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, to equal pay for equal work without any discrimination, to just and favorable remuneration (implying a minimum wage), to freedom of association at the workplace, and to reasonable limitations of working hours, including periodic holidays with pay. These rights were reaffirmed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which also added the right to safe and healthy working conditions (Article 7). The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights restated the right to freedom of association at the workplace (Article 22) and added the right to be protected from forced labor (Article 8). As Gross points out, all of these rights are also discussed in greater detail in numerous ILO conventions.
A Shameful Business is important for scholarship and teaching in the subfields of American government, government regulation of business, and human rights. Chapter 2, entitled “Justice and Human Rights,” would even be a good chapter to assign in a course on political philosophy. The author's argument about the long-term lack of respect for basic worker rights in America provides an interesting critique of the simple race-to-the-bottom thesis that many of us already discuss in our classes and in our scholarship. In Gross' view, repression of worker rights in America is a result of many choices that we and our government representatives have made over more than a century, not the result of recent increases in international economic competition.
