Organized around visits by leading scholars of labor, human rights, and migration, this seminar will consider possibilities for the achievement of workers’ rights in today’s globalized economy marked by glaring inequalities and numerous human rights violations. Over the course of the past few decades, workers’ rights—especially rights to association and collective bargaining, non-discrimination, and freedom from forced and child labor—have come to be recognized as human rights. Yet the challenges of realizing and enforcing such rights in the context of global supply chains and increased precarity are immense, especially for vulnerable individuals such as informal, domestic, migrant, and undocumented workers. This seminar will critically assess the extent to which human rights and other legal and political means might effectively combat those challenges.
Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions, write short critical responses to papers provided by visiting scholars, and write a longer essay on a topic related to the themes that arise during the semester. Readings for the seminar will come from a variety of disciplines, and the course is open to law students as well as to non-law graduate and professional students with relevant background.
Engle, Karen 