The ILO and the High Commmissioner for Human Rights

On Thursday, may 19 we visited two international organizations, in addition to the World Council of Churches: the visit to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and to the ILO. What is so impressive about the leaders whom we met, is both their knowledge of many parts of the world and their ease of communicating in multiple languages. There, of course are difficult issues confronting them, from defining human rights standards that will be accepted in both the developed and developing worlds. There especially is the need to find standards for non-state actors, such as global business.

There also is the major issue of how to treat migrants with justice. Globally, there is the massive movement of people from the developing world to the developed. Since employers and communities benefit from the labor of most of these migrants, justice would demand they be given the rights and opportunities of others living in their community. However, fears of both the migrants taking jobs from citizens and importing alien cultural or social customs results in all sort s of efforts to restrict immigration or deny rights to the migrants. While understandable, many of these efforts have the consequence of making the migrants work under the “table,” or outside regular legal work structures, making it advantageous for employers to hire the undocumented. If hiring a legal worker means the employer will need to pay the legal minimum wage and adhere to other labor laws, and hiring the undocumented means a lower wage and no threat of complaints by workers to labor law enforcement, then it is to the disadvantage of citizen workers that the undocumented aren't granted full work benefits.

These issues especially raise problems for people from the U.S. So often we resist applying global standards to our migrants or to the behavior of non-state actors. The consequence has often been the U.S. blocks global progress on imposing standards anywhere, to the great disadvantage of U.S. workers and employers. Nations that allow great abuse of human rights can avoid global sanction because the U.S. has helped block effective global regulation. One of our leadership challenges is to get U.S. Citizens to be less inherently hostile to global standards.