The Foreign Service Journal, November 2010

30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 Justice at Work: Globalization and the Human Rights of Workers Robert Senser, Xlibris Corporation, 2009, $19.99, paperback, 232 pages. In Justice at Work , Robert Senser provides an unflinching look at the often-violated rights of workers the world over. The book contains some of the author’s articles written between 1991 and 2008 ex- amining labor practices in much of the world, particu- larly in Bangladesh, India and China. Senser spotlights how the Western world condones horrific working conditions — however unwittingly — and argues that personal responsibility is necessary to improve these conditions. He graphically describes scenes of employees treated as machines: children as young as 7 taken from their mothers to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week; young women trapped in burning factories; workers subjected to polluted air full of toxic chemicals. But the book does more than describe the abuses. It also examines the causes of these problems and chronicles some attempts to rectify them (including, for example, the successful 1998 crusade of a group of students at Duke University to stop the licensing of Duke’s logo on sweatshop-produced merchandise and the beginnings of the anti-sweatshop movement). Senser believes that in the 21st century there can be no more excuses for such problems: these outrages are not a necessary phase in a country’s industrialization and should not be ignored under the assumption that they will ultimately go away. By confronting these issues and putting a human face on cheap labor, he wants to make his readers think twice before purchasing an inexpensive garment or a toy “made in China.” Retired FSO Robert Senser served as a labor attaché for 21 years. He earned a B.S. at Loyola University in Chicago and conducted postgraduate studies at the Uni- versity of Chicago. He has had more than 50 years of ex- perience in human rights issues, and serves as editor of Human Rights forWorkers , an online newsletter devoted to wide-ranging coverage of labor, trade and economic issues (http://humanrightsforworkers.blogspot.com/ ).