Forthcoming Employee Rights Employment Policy Journal Symposium on Decent Work

When I'm not teaching, writing, reading, or occasionally blogging, I'm lucky enough to get to work on every issue of the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal. I've learned so much by working on the articles published in this really excellent peer review specialty journal, but I rarely get the chance to post about them before the issue comes out. The issue we will send out this June is an exception.

In this issue, Susan Bisom-Rapp (Thomas Jefferson) organized a symposium on Decent Work in a Post-Recessionary World, and assembled a great group of articles on the subject. Here's a little preview:

•   Janice R. Bellace (Penn’s Wharton School) examines the connection between “decent work,” as expressed in the ILO's 2008 Declaration and 1998 Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, tracing the ILO’s commitment to social justice back to its founding, demonstrating that the agency’s purposes and goals serve as a link between the human rights principles expressed in the 1998 Declaration and the proactive stance of the ILO’s decent work program, which provides a foundation for sustainable economic recovery.
• Roger Blanpain (University of Leuven (Belgium) and University of Tilburg (the Netherlands)), provides  a perspective from Brussels, the capital of the European Union (EU), reviewing EU efforts to promote the goals and principles of decent work in a Europe reeling from the effects of the global economic crisis.
• Susan Bisom-Rapp (Thomas Jefferson), Andrew Frazer (University of Wollongong, New South Wales), and Malcolm Sargeant (Middlesex University Business School, London), employ decent work as a yardstick to examine how older workers fared during the global financial crisis and are faring during the recovery in  Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
• Michael J. Zimmer (Loyola, Chicago), tackles the long-standing, global decline of the trade union movement and its connection to global increases in income inequality, the latter a central concern of the decent work agenda. 
• Peggie R. Smith (Wash. U)examines the regulatory challenges associated with securing decent work for an economically-marginalized group, those laboring in domestic service, providing both a global and local focus
• Timothy P. Glynn (Seton Hall) writes about decent work and workplace law enforcement at a time in which many US corporations have imported a central characteristic of globalization – shifting production or services to independent thirdparty suppliers. 

The symposium is an excellent introduction to international and comparative labor law, and explores many incredibly important questions surrounding the standards of living and working made more complicated by the global recession. We all should be thinking about these things if we're not already. Look for the issue to hit your local library sometime in June.

MM