Jeffrey Hilgert

Université de Montréal | UdeM · School of Industrial Relations

Today, hazardous work kills 2.3 million people each year and injures millions more. Among the most compelling yet controversial forms of legal protection for workers is the right to refuse unsafe work. The rise of globalization, precarious work, neoliberal politics, attacks on unions, and the idea of individual employment rights have challenged the...

Article 23(4) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states ‘Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.’ This article documents the global legislative history of Article 23(4) trade union rights from its original drafting to interpretation by international labour standards. The history include...

The Ontario Network of Injured Workers' Groups in Canada is leading a multi-year campaign called Workers' Comp is a Right to reform the provincial workers' injury compensation system and to fight back against regressive changes made to the system over several decades. At their Annual General Meeting in Toronto held in June 2019, delegates voted una...

Face à la complexité du monde du travail, la société doit pouvoir compter sur une discipline scientifique qui en étudie les différents aspects et qui forme des personnes aptes à comprendre et à solutionner les problèmes qui en découlent. Le champ des relations industrielles occupe cette fonction depuis près d’un siècle en Amérique du Nord. À l’occa...

The Ontario Network of Injured Workers’ Groups is leading a multi-year campaign called Workers’ Compensation is a Right to push for reform of the provincial employment injury benefit system. This concept note was written as a discussion paper (unpublished) for internal debate in early 2019 giving consideration to using the individual complaint mech...

Article 23(4) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states "Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." This paper documents the travaux préparatoire of Article 23(4) and the consequences for the protection of human dignity at work in a globalized political economy. This legislative history i...

On March 23, 2015 the Turkish government ratified ILO Convention No. 176, the international labour convention concerning occupational safety and health in mines. This multilateral treaty will enter into force for Turkey in 2016. After a lengthy advocacy campaign that received renewed attention after major disasters in the mining industry, more atte...

This article examines the development of the ILO’s Global Strategy on Occupational Safety and Health through the lens of social exclusion. Social exclusion is a transversal concept across the social sciences. The article integrates the study of exclusion as an essential element of institutional analysis in industrial relations. After discussing the...

This article introduces the idea of human rights to the topic of workers' compensation in the United States. It discusses what constitutes a human rights approach and explains how this approach conflicts with those policy ideas that have provided the foundation historically for workers' compensation in the United States. Using legal and historical...

Over the past twenty years, International Labour Standards have been cited increasingly as the authoritative, worldwide body of jurisprudence on workers' rights as human rights. Continuing the debate on what constitutes labor rights, the author contrasts the definition of workers' rights under international human rights standards with U.S. labor hi...

Despite advances in the notion of human rights at work, the idea of human rights has not had a place in industrial relations scholarship. This paper examines core ideas and assumptions underlying the major theoretical approaches in industrial relations in order to understand each framework's compatibility with the human rights worldview. Five major...

As the labor movement refocuses its commitment to organizing, it is turning increasingly toward organizing in communities of color. We know from quantitative research that workers of color are more likely to organize and are concentrated in low-wage industries that are more sus ceptible to organizing. Despite major victories such as Justice for Jan...