Some guy on the speedline is pleasure reading Collapse. Wonder if he’ll finish. @dlaufenberg #globalization

As commencement season draws to a close, those of us who graduated from college 10 or 20 (or 30 or 40) years ago might be thinking back to intense late-night political discussions in a dorm room or sitting in a circle on the campus green as our philosophy seminar debated the finer points of Plato on a beautiful spring day. (The hangovers and bouts of social anxiety from those years? All blissfully forgotten.)

Ratcheting Labor Standards: Regulation for Continuous Improvement in the Global Workplace

Charles Sabel
Dara O'Rourke
Archon Fung


May 2, 2000

KSG Working Paper No. 00-010; Columbia Law and Economic Working Paper No. 185; Columbia Law School, Pub. Law Research Paper No. 01-21

Abstract:
It is a brute fact of contemporary globalization?unmistakable as activists and journalists catalog scandal after scandal?that the very transformations making possible higher quality, cheaper products often lead to unacceptable conditions of work: brutal use of child labor, dangerous environments, punishingly long days, starvation wages, discrimination, suppression of expression and association. In all quarters, the question is not whether to address these conditions, but how.

"The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 that works toward a world in which the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression and injustice, and enjoy a relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, free from economic and political subordination. To that end, our mission is to provide information and analysis on the region, and on its complex and changing relationship with the United States, as tools for education and advocacy - to foster knowledge beyond borders." (from their About Us page)