Chapter 18

Workers Rights and International Business

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Child Labor
Child labor is illegal in the United States and in many other parts of the world, but it is not illegal everywhere. The International Labor Office claims that 25 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 14 are working in Asia and parts of Western Europe. Child labor is not simply a matter of children working. Often they are paid nothing or are charged more for their room and board than they earn, making them bonded servants working long hours in extremely poor conditions. Multinationals may not directly or indirectly violate human rights. With respect to child labor, they may not directly employ child labor in their factories. They also may not use suppliers that employ child labor. The obligation not to use child labor further implies that multinationals cannot simply claim ignorance about the workers who produce the goods they buy or the conditions in which they work.

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Sweatshops
Sweatshop is a term that is broadly used to include a variety of poor working conditions. Typically sweatshops are in old buildings, with poor or little ventilation; poor sanitary facilities; and unsafe, unhealthy, and crowded working conditions. They pay very low wages for long hours of work, and the workers have no rights within them. They receive no benefits, and are often subject to physical and verbal abuse and sexual harassment or worse. Sweatshops, however defined, violate the human rights of workers, and hence should be eliminated.
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Outsourcing and International Business

The export of American manufacturing has been faulted from many points of view. When industry is exported, however, then Americans lose jobs, and harm is done to the country as a whole from the loss of industry as well as jobs. This adds to unemployment, reduces the national tax base, and benefits the company at the expense of the country. The argument is of a utilitarian type. But it is onesided, for it considers only the company, American workers, and the United States.
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Outsourcing and International Business

The argument against the export of jobs is usually held inconsistently. Those who decry such outsourcing have no complaint about other countries opening manufacturing plants in the United States and providing jobs for Americans.

If outsourcing is unethical, then to accept such outsourced jobs from other countries would be to be complicit in an unethical practice. That no one defends such a claim is indicative of the onesided view that the opposition to outsourcing jobs abroad involves.
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Migrant and Illegal Workers

The term migrant worker is used somewhat differently in different countries. The UN established an International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. That document defines a migrant worker as a person who is to be engaged, is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which he or she is not a national.
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Migrant Workers
As the term is used in the United States, migrant workers include all workers, regardless of citizenship, who work in primarily poor-paying agricultural or seasonal jobs. The opportunity for employers exploiting migrant workers is considerable, and the workers have few of the safeguards that employees with permanent positions enjoy. In agriculture, the largest number of immigrant workers in the United States come from Mexico.
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Migrant Workers
The United States is not the only country, however, that imports labor for jobs that its nationals do not want. Germany and Japan are among the others for which this is true, and Great Britain and France have considerable immigrant populations that also take on the less desirable jobs. Although the societies in question are suffering the ills of social unrest and are struggling with effective ways to possibly assimilate their immigrant population, the immigrants themselves suffer not only second-class status, but discrimination and lack of opportunity beyond the poorest-paying jobs.
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Illegal Immigration
A current labor issue in the United States is the problem of what to do about the approximately 12 million (and perhaps as high as 20 million) illegal immigrants. The United States is a country that is built on successive waves of immigration. The number of illegal border crossings has increased consistently since 1980, with most of the illegal immigrants being poor and having little education. The number of illegal immigrants increased because both they and the businesses that hired them found the situation advantageous, even though some in the society at large complained of the drain on social services and the added costs of sustaining a social welfare net.
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Discrimination, Corrupt Governments, and Multinationals

The experience of U.S. multinationals in South Africa allows us to derive a number of lessons about how to operate in the context of a structurally immoral society. General Motors and the Sullivan Principles.

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The Right to Work

The right to work is recognized in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which says, Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. The right is appropriately applied differently in different societies, but is a right in all societies. It can be considered on four dimensions: as a negative right, as a positive right, as having an individual dimension, and as having a social dimension.
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