JUSTICE AT WORK: GLOBALIZATION AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF WORKERS (Paperback)

~ Robert Senser (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Xlibris Corporation (March 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1436396123
• ISBN-13: 978-1436396127
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #981,130 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How globalization affects you, why you should care and what you can do about it, April 8, 2009

By	Sylvia M. Booth "Sylvia Maria" (Grosse Ile, MI, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Robert A. Senser may have spent over 20 years working for the Foreign Service as a Labor Attaché, but his voice in this engaging book is one of an activist personally involved in the defense of workers' and human rights through his writing. This book seems to be at the same time a compilation of the author's published articles and a recount of a personal exploration of his efforts "to describe how globalization affects working men and women and how it creates the need to integrate human rights, including the human rights of workers, into global rules and practices", as he eloquently states in his introduction.

I particularly appreciated Senser's talking directly to the reader from the very beginning of the book. He explains who he is and how and why he started caring about the plight of workers in his introduction, and then in the first part of the book (through chapter 7) he seems to take us on a journey with him, complete with eyewitness accounts, to answer the unspoken question of why the rest of us should care about the human rights of workers. This part of the book, which talks about issues like sweatshops and child labor, has the effect of drawing you in like a good conversation. By providing real-world examples to illustrate his research into the issues he provides a convincing counter-argument to a prevailing view of development that argues that a lack of basic worker safety or that children's sweatshops are ok on some level because certain countries are still "catching up".

The rest of the book follows on from this first introduction in the same personally engaging style when it turns towards important issues surrounding Globalization, such as dangerous inequalities in global trade agreements and the WTO. Not that there aren't a couple of left turns (my favorite is chapter 15, "The Delights of Sunday" which argues the merits of making Sunday a day of rest from work and, more importantly, shopping!). But this only makes the book seem more like an intelligent conversation with an interesting activist. It is refreshing to read a book which manages to talk about such important issues in so friendly and accessible a tone without compromising scholarly research and the value of personal experience on the issues.

The flow of chapters -some follow one from the other, others seem more random in progression -seem to form an arc drawing us in to answer the question of what we can personally do about this protecting the rights of workers and human rights in general, now that we are armed with more insight. Senser dedicates the end of his book (from about chapter 18 to 24) to proposing concrete solutions and areas where reform and action is necessary. Agree oror disagree, this book definitely provides food for thought and makes for an interesting addition (especially) to the debate between free trade ideologues and the proponents of improved workers' rights and protections in the arena of international trade agreements. It also makes a contribution to the debate around the nature of Globalization. Globalization is a complicated and entangled phenomenon, and the author not only explains how he sees it as if he were talking to a good friend (ie: clearly), but he takes a definite position, one who many of us that are trying to think of our own (local, community) alternatives to it, share.