Our Rights

Greetings,

For our final class blog, please consider the following set of questions and first respond any or all parts:

Do all human beings have fundamental rights, and if so then what are our rights and how should we protect them?

Should the government ensure that our ‘fundamental rights’ are protected, or can they leave it up to workers and employers to leave the average citizen with enough money and benefits to enjoy these 'rights?'

Since employees consent to working contracts, should they alone be responsible to make the best possible decisions that would cover their fundamental rights? Why or why not?


Next, please read the excerpted article below and then post a second response any of the above questions. You may also comment on your classmate's posts as you wish.

Thank you!

Florence

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“Intrinsic worth, consent, and coercion in economic contexts.”
By Maureen O'Danu
http://odanu.livejournal.com/320684.html Nov. 14th, 2007 at 1:01 PM

I think that perhaps the most fundamental concept in liberalism (or progressivism) is that human life has intrinsic value beyond whatever economic goods or public goods an individual contributes to the world. A natural corellary of this is that since human life has intrinsic value, those things which sustain human life are rights, not privileges. These rights exist in cultural and local contexts, but they can be broken down pretty easily into those things in the bottom rung or two of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Humans, in this conception, have the right to breatheable air, food, drinkable water, the ability to bathe and void bladder and bowel in a sanitary manner, access to preventative, maintenance, and emergency health care, and a right to housing and body coverings that protect them from the elements. Further, humans have a right to live unmolested by violent and chaotic environments, and to be educated to the standards of their societies. Finally humans have the right to engage in alliances with other humans for mutual benefit , mate and have offspring or choose not to. Note that, unlike the libertarian concept of rights, most of these are positive rights. Also note that most human societies throughout time, including modern times, grant these rights without question to children, elders, and (to varying degrees) many disabled persons. These rights were implied, but not stated, in the US constitution's preamble, under the cover of "promoting the general welfare". Even earlier, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson called it "the pursuit of happiness". Maslow's work was not known then, but it has long been a common conception that in order for a human to pursue or obtain happiness, those needs essential to the continuation of life need to be fulfilled. (Edited to fix rather embarrassing brain fart)

It is only when dealing with able bodied adults (sometimes culturally limited to men) that these rights are not generally assumed. The libertarian stance is that at this point (at least) there is no responsibility of society (in the form of government, even self-selected governments) to ensure these rights, as employment contracts stand on their own to support these rights, and anyone who is not willing (or able) to work forfeits these rights so long as "unable" doesn't include a definition of long term disability. Furthermore, the libertarian stance is that there is no responsibility of an employer to guarantee wages and/or benefits sufficient for the employee to be able to obtain these positive rights in the unfettered market, even when the employee works "full time" or even more than full time. This stance clearly supports a libertarian idea that humans do not have intrinsic worth, but only economic and/or public worth -- that if the market is such that some people are unable to meet the basic needs of humanity while working, it is incumbent upon the individual alone to make some change to himself or his immediate environment (i.e. obtaining more education, doubling up in inexpensive apartments, switching from healthier foods to less expensive but less healthy foods, etc.) in order to meet those basic needs.

In fact, the concepts of "worthy" versus "unworthy" poor have a long political and social history. Interestingly, those who have committed crimes and are sentenced to incarceration are granted, in this sense, more rights than those who cannot obtain a job that pays sufficiently well to meet basic human needs. The libertarian idea of rights is that the employer's right to make profits supercedes the employee's right to be able to survive on the wages offered. A common libertarian defense to this view is that the employee "consents" to the employment contract, and therefore the employer has no further obligation. What is left out of this equation, however, are the coercive effects of the possibilities of starvation, homelessness, and loss of health care access. The cumulative effects of these coercions in the employment market in fact make the employer/employee contract extremely coercive, particularly in cases where geography, incomplete information, or monopolistic or oligarchic situations limit employment choices.

Unions to some extent, when powerful, can mitigate this coercion and create a much more just power structure between employer and employee. It is partially for this reason that corporatists have consistently and continually reviled unions and similar (older) concepts such as guilds, and worked to undermine their power through both legal and exta-legal measures. Corporate "personhood" where the individual liability for illegal decisions made by people in corporations is diffused and weakened, exacerbates the power imbalance, as does the differing ability for corporations and their financiers to contribute to political dialogue as compared to those who work for salaries or hourly wages.

Modern economics likes to treat most humans as replaceable cogs in the free market machine, granting only entrepreneurs, financiers, and corporate leaders actual personhood and "free choice". The rest of us poor slobs are told that we have free choice while one choice after another is taken away by corporate decisions and corporate-driven governmental decisions beyond our control. We are manipulated by corporate driven media, mislead by corporate owned politicians, and mis-used by the corporations themselves, whose loyalty to their stockholders greatly exceeds their loyalty to those who make those stock options possible. Some poor slobs even believe the propaganda, and see themselves as actual or soon to be elites in this new world order. This is, of course, a belief that is encouraged by the elite, if only for their own amusement.