Economics for the right to work

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12130
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Date: 01 March 2019
• Author: Manuel C. BRANCO

International Labour Review, Vol. 158 (2019), No. 1

Copyright © The author 2019

Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2019

* Department of Economics, University of Évora, Portugal, email: mbranco@uevora.pt.

Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors,

and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Economics for the right to work

Manuel C. BRANCO*

Abstract. This article argues that mainstream economic theory is one of the main

reasons why the human right to work, which was recognized by the international

community in 1966 , appears not to have been taken seriously. In the mainstream

discourse, labour is a cost, employment is a second-tier objective, individuals are

resources with production specications, and rights are rigidities. Economics based

on human rights and seeking to promote the right to work must construe that right

as more than just ghting unemployment, regard full employment as an end in it-

self and place the individual at the heart of its raison d’être.

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its fail-

ure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable dis-

tribution of wealth and incomes.” John Maynard Keynes wrote those words at

the beginning of the last chapter of The general theory of employment, interest,

and money (1936, p. 372). Later, Galbraith (1996 and 1998) argued that it is

in the interest of both people and society to guarantee a job for every person

who is t and willing to work. He believed that while an afuent society could

live with relatively high levels of involuntary unemployment, a good society

should not. In his 1987 Richard T. Ely Lecture to the American Economic As-

sociation, Alan Blinder considered the failure to provide productive employ-

ment for all those willing and able to work to be one of the major weaknesses

of market capitalism and reducing high unemployment a political, economic

and moral challenge of the highest order (1988, p. 1). Maurice Allais, who was

awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, went even further and said that

high levels of joblessness should be seen as a major threat of disruption to our

modern democratic ethos (1996, p. 14).

These are just a few of many statements, from various schools of thought,

that consider unemployment a major shortcoming. In fact, more than a short-

coming, unemployment is a potential human rights violation. According to

John Dewey, “The rst great demand of a better social order [...] is the guar-

antee of the right, to every individual who is capable of it, to work” (Dewey

International Labour Review64

and Ratner, 1939, pp. 420–421). Indeed, the right to work rst gained inter-

national recognition in 1948, when it was proclaimed in Article 23 of the Univer-

sal Declaration of Human Rights. It was subsequently conrmed in Article 6

of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which

was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1966

and had been ratied by 164 countries as at March 2015.

Why, then, has unemployment not yet been successfully tackled? Why

does society appear to be stepping away from securing the universal right

to the opportunity to earn a living by work freely chosen or accepted, as

the world’s major economies were trying to do in the 1960s? Contrary to

what might reasonably be expected in a world where human rights have been

tacitly accepted as international customary law, it would appear that the right

to work is taken less seriously than other economic and social rights.

Minkler, for example, blames the failure to reach a broad agreement on

the best ways to implement economic rights on the fact that countries have

different histories and cultures, which imply different policy priorities (2007,

pp. 2–3). Mundlak alludes to some general arguments sustaining that economic

rights are difcult to implement and the right to work is, in particular, too

vague a guiding principle at a time of growing uncertainty about labour mar-

ket regulation (2007, p. 191). Finally, Sarkin and Koenig posit that any social

legislation protecting the right to work has had to compete with government

objectives to reduce national budgets and minimize government intrusion into

the free market (2011, p. 7).

In this article, we argue that the human right to work has not been taken

seriously by mainstream economics itself. Therefore, if human rights are to be

taken seriously, the rst thing we must do is to take a critical look at the dis-

course of mainstream economics and the way it is produced. This same critical

look will not examine the human right to work with equal penetration, however.

This may seem reductive and partial, as human rights principles are as disputable

as economic postulates (see, for example, Collins, 2015). However, the purpose

of this article is not to engage in a paradigmatic discussion about the human

right to work, a task well beyond the skills of its author, but rather to explore the

paradigmatic implications for economics of the tacit acceptance of human rights

in general, and of the right to work in particular, as international customary law.

First of all, what do we mean by “mainstream economics”? The dominant

school of thought – not only among academics, but also among government

ofcials and the media – is of an individualistic, utilitarian and equilibrium-

driven approach, obsessed with mathematical formalization and dogmatically

believing in the balancing virtues of the market and in the neo-naturalistic

driving force of economic behaviour. Mainstream economics are not a unied

body of theory (see Colander, Holt and Rosser, 2004) and many mainstream

economists will perhaps not recognize themselves in this portrait. Many of

them nevertheless adhere relatively strictly to the majority of these precepts.

Yet economics is not limited to this dominant school of thought, and

today various economists already share some principles reconciling the logic