Occasionally Tom Friedman gets the picture: http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/friedman/073099frie.html July 30, 1999 FOREIGN AFFAIRS / By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN The New Human Rights In this post-totalitarian world, the human rights debate needs an update. While Americans are focusing on issues of free speech, elections and the right to write an op-ed piece, people in the developing world are increasingly focused on workers' rights, jobs, the right to organize and the right to have decent working conditions. Quite simply, for many workers around the world the oppression of the unchecked commissars has been replaced by the oppression of the unregulated capitalists, who move their manufacturing from country to country, constantly in search of those who will work for the lowest wages and lowest standards. To some, the Nike swoosh is now as scary as the hammer and sickle. These workers need practical help from the West, not the usual moral grandstanding. To address their needs, the human rights community needs to retool in this post-cold-war world, every bit as much as the old arms makers have had to learn how to make subway cars and toasters instead of tanks. "In the cold war," says Michael Posner, head of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, "the main issue was how do you hold governments accountable when they violate laws and norms. Today the emerging issue is how do you hold private companies accountable for the treatment of their workers at a time when government control is ebbing all over the world, or governments themselves are going into business and can't be expected to play the watchdog or protection role." The impulse is to call for some global governing body to fix the problem. But there is none and there will be none. The only answer is for activists to learn how to use globalization to their advantage -- to super-empower themselves -- so there can be global governance, even without global government. They have to learn how to compel companies to behave better by mobilizing consumers and the Internet. I'm talking about a network solution for human rights, and it's the future of social advocacy. [...]
