Abstract
For those who want to engage with the debate about whether there is an advantage to framing workers’ rights as human rights, a debate that this journal and a number of other venues have taken up, this book, Social Problems: A Human Rights Perspective, by Eric Bonds, will not delve into that debate or answer your questions. However, this book will provide some new perspectives for readers unfamiliar with using human rights as an analytical tool to examine social problems in the United States and elsewhere. It is a concise text that would work very effectively for upper-level undergraduate sociology or labor studies courses, or perhaps for early graduate courses. It is well written in accessible language that articulates various social problems from a human rights frame and offers possible solutions that (thankfully) include the importance of social movements in creating these solutions. So the question arises, why should this book be of interest or use to much of the audience for this journal, most of whom are not sociologists, but rather are involved with labor and labor education?
Here is how this reviewer believes this book can be useful, in labor education and elsewhere. Bonds takes questions often analyzed with many charts and graphs (which he does use) but also inserts real life individuals and situations into the text. He brings the role of social movements into the problem of inequality. He uses short stories of individuals and their financial vulnerability to illustrate the problems of low-wage workers. Quotes from people around the country who took part in occupying town greens and other sites during Occupy Wall Street protests give a picture of the anxieties of those at the margins of society. In terms of globalization, he suggests that people take a look at their cellphones (of course many students would already have them in hand) and articulates the relevant human rights issues: how the phones are not only assembled in factories with unsafe working conditions halfway around the globe, but also the unsafe conditions for the workers in the mines in other countries that provide the various rare metals that make up the inner circuitry of the phone. He weaves in both sociological theory and a human rights framework as he explores social problems and does so in a straightforward manner that readers will appreciate. Thus, this text is an option for worker education programs that take up questions of globalization’s true meaning and how to see the diminution of human rights issues in their daily lives.
In the Preface and chapter 1, “Introduction to the Human Rights Perspective,” Bonds lays out a rationale for analyzing social problems from a human rights perspective. He provides a brief history of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and some of its attendant controversies and limitations. He also asserts the usefulness of a human rights framework in that it serves as a set of “normative expectations that provide an impetus for social action” (p. 8). Subsequent chapters take up a number of interrelated social problems. Chapter 2, “Rights to Wellbeing and Property in an Unequal Society,” intersperses stories from Occupy Wall Street participants and other real life examples in discussing the inequality in the United States. He shows how the United States measures poverty, how poverty is underestimated in these measurements, and how this mismeasurement impacts many families who need various forms of assistance, but are deemed ineligible due to their incomes falling slightly above the official poverty level. A great deal of this chapter also discusses levels of wealth inequality in the United States and the ideological arguments that support this inequality.
Bonds turns to “American Inequality and the Rights to Speech and Democracy” in chapter 3. This chapter takes up the impact of money in politics and how the power of large donors corrupts our political system. He argues that large corporate donors undermine the average individuals’ free (political) speech, given that special interests’ campaign contributions grossly overshadow what average Americans can contribute. A chart of the costs of campaigns for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency dramatically makes his point. He also discusses the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court and the movement to pass a Constitutional Amendment that would affirm that only “natural persons” can make political contributions.
Chapter 4, “Racism and the Human Right to be Treated Equally before the Law,” provides many instances of the abridgement of the rights of people of color under our criminal justice system, including the cases that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. Bonds relates these to human rights standards and presents a brief history of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s and their accomplishments. Additionally, the impact of the war on drugs and the emergence of mass incarceration are shown to be violations of human rights. In defining racism, Bonds highlights the differences between personal racism and institutional racism, and how each plays out in the United States. As in the other chapters, he elaborates some of the policy changes that are needed to achieve a more racially just society. Chapter 5, “Sexism and the Right to Bodily Integrity,” presents the problem of rape to identify the many aspects of sexism and the violation of the human rights of women. As in previous chapters, he provides a brief history of the various feminist movements and activism. Economic discrimination against women, failure to pass an equal rights amendment, and failure of the United States to ratify international conventions on women’s equality also illustrate the ways in which women’s rights are relegated in importance.
Chapter 6, “U.S. Society, Global Inequalities and Human Rights,” and the concluding chapter 7, “Conclusion: Volunteerism, Activism, and the Pursuit of Human Rights,” provide a global context in which to consider human rights, and the social movements and activist organizations that promote human rights on a global scale. There is a brief discussion of colonialism and its legacies of human rights abuses, and how our current consumption habits (e.g., the cellphone example mentioned above) continue to generate human rights violations on a global scale. The concluding chapter offers very meaningful discussion of how volunteerism is insufficient to solve social problems and leads into a question of the necessity of political action to achieve a more human rights–oriented society.
This is a book whose main points are hard to refute. Bonds skillfully covers a wide range of topics and makes human rights real. There are more expansive texts available for those who require deeper analysis. However, for labor educators and activists, the emphasis on how important social movements are to achieve human rights is a welcome aspect of the text. This book can expand workers’ notions of their place in the world and the interrelationship of issues and problems, and it can offer students a concise, thoughtful set of ideas that help achieve a more socially just society.