Defining Global Justice offers the first comprehensive overview of the history of the United States role in the International Labor Organization (ILO). In this thought-provoking book, Edward Lorenz addresses the challenge laid down by the President of the American Political Science Association in 2000, who urged scholars to discover "how well-structured institutions could enable the world to have 'a new birth of freedom'." Lorenz's study describes one model of a well-structured institution. His history of the U.S. interaction with the ILO shows how some popular organizations, from organized labor through women's, academic, legal, and religious institutions have been able to utilize the ILO structure to counter what the APSA president called "self-serving elites and . . . their worst impulses." These organizations succeeded repeatedly in introducing popular visions of social justice into global economic planning and the world economy.
Lorenz demonstrates the key role played by the social gospel movement, academic elites, women leaders, lawyers, and organized labor in the quest for global justice through labor standards. By underscoring the role of women in this process, he highlights the importance of gender relations in the development of labor standards policy. Lorenz also shows how transformations in the economic and social reproduction of knowledge gradually displaced academics from the cutting edge of research on labor issues.
Throughout this fascinating study, Lorenz reminds his readers that the development of decent labor standards has come in large part from the efforts of religious groups and a host of other nongovernmental, voluntary civic organizations that have insisted labor is a human activity, not a commodity.
Defining Global Justice reveals why the United States, despite showing exceptional restraint in domestic social policy making, played a leading role in the pursuit of just international labor standards. Lorenz's lucid volume covers a century's worth of efforts, charting the development of a body of international law and an institutional structure as important to the global economy of the twenty-first century as the battle against slavery was in the nineteenth century.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"...an intriguing story that offers insights into the evolution of international organizations and their ability to define norms of behavior. This is a valuable book in that it carefully and fully lays out the philosophical and legal arguments for labor standards and documents when they have been applied over a long period of history."-The Journal of Economic History
"As the first complete history of the ILO, this book by Edward C. Lorenz is important for its evidence, clear narrative and ... theoretical contribution." -American Historical Review
"This volume is timely. Lorenz provides an insightful history of the US's role in the development of global labor standards through the ILO. This well-written study persuasively demonstrates that 'well-organized groups can force the policy process to consider values, other than economic efficiency, in setting economic policies.'" -Choice
"Defining Global Justice chronicles in an unusual and intriguing way the rise and eventual sequential transformations of the International Labor Organization....[A] novel and very interesting history of real-life battles regarding international labor standards and an important reminder that within the traditions of our profession there once thrived a strong concern about standards of human dignity." -EH.NET
"Based on an impressive command of a wide variety of sources, this well-organized and clearly written account explains how the social gospel movement, Progressive Era reformers, academics and attorneys, feminists and consumers, and labor unions attempted to shape an international organization that could establish standards to protect workers around the world." -Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
"This useful review of American attitudes toward international labor standards starts with World War I and the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1919. It usefully discusses the movement toward national labor standards within the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. failure to ratify many of the ILO conventions, and the divisions within American labor on the ILO." -Foreign Affairs
"...one cannot help but be impressed by the drive and vigour of Lorenz's prose."-Journal of Contemporary History
"Professor Lorenz has written an important book that provides an invaluable portrait of the International Labor Organization. Especially significant among his several achievements is his analysis of the contributions of one of this country's unjustly neglected citizens, John G. Winant." -James O. Freedman, President Emeritus, Dartmouth College
"This is a thoroughly researched and extremely well written book on the complex development of global labor standards and the ILO. It should be read urgently by anyone concerned with problems of global justice, and particularly by those who take the view that 'labor is not merely a commodity.'" -Randolph B. Persaud, Co-Director of the Sub-Field of Comparative and International Race Relations at American University, and Director of American University's Interdisciplinary Council on the Americas
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Maße
Höhe: 235 mm
Breite: 157 mm
Dicke: 22 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-268-02550-2 (9780268025502)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Edward C. Lorenz is Reid-Knox Professor of History and Political Science at Alma College.
