ABSTRACT
The tensions among globalization, national states, and the protection of individuals are perhaps nowhere more evident than in struggles to protect workers in developing countries. For the past century, labor rights have been defined through workers’ localized struggles, in conflicts that have almost invariably been resolved through state regulation at the workplace. True, labor rights are increasingly discussed in universalistic terms: at the tail end of the twentieth century, there was broad international agreement about a core set of labor rights-freedom of association, freedom from bonded and child labor, freedom from discrimination-but the actual protection of those rights has been through mechanisms linked to citizenship, with more limited scope. In recent decades, however, globalization seems to have undermined the ability of national states to protect those rights, and weakened organized labor; many unions, especially in developing countries, seek new strategies to deal with newly mobile capital, in ways that highlight potential tensions between a language of universal rights and citizenship claims within the nation-state.
