Rights, Not Interests: Resolving Value Clashes under the National Labor Relations Act

[Excerpt] This provocative book by the leading historian of the National Labor Relations Board offers a reexamination of the NLRB and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by applying internationally accepted human rights principles as standards for judgment. These new standards challenge every orthodoxy in U.S. labor law and labor relations. James A. Gross argues that the NLRA was and remains at its core a workers’ rights statute. Gross shows how value clashes and choices between those who interpret the NLRA as a workers’ rights statute and those who contend that the NLRA seeks only a balance between the economic interests of labor and management have been major influences in the evolution of the board and the law. Gross contends, contrary to many who would write its obituary, that the NLRA is not dead. Instead he concludes with a call for visionary thinking, which would include, for example, considering the U.S. Constitution as a source of workers’ rights. Rights, Not Interests will appeal to labor activists and those who are trying to reform our labor laws as well as scholars and students of management, human resources, and industrial relation

Human Rights in Labor and Employment Relations: International and Domestic Perspectives

[Excerpt] This volume is intended to collect the best current scholarship in the new and growing field of labor rights and human rights. We hope it will serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners as well as for teachers and students in university-level labor and human rights courses. The animating idea for the volume is the proposition that workers\u27 rights are human rights. But we recognize that this must be more than a slogan. Promoting labor rights as human rights requires drawing on theoretical work in labor studies and in human rights scholarship and developing closely reasoned arguments based on what is happening in the real world. Citing labor clauses in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one thing; relating them to the real world where workers seek to exercise their rights is something else. The contributors to this volume provide a firm theoretical foundation grounded in the reality of labor activism and advocacy in a market-driven global economy