FLWEFA as a human right

In the recent run up to the passage of healthcare reform in the United States, a public debate occurred over the question of whether basic healthcare was a right; a question all other industrialized nations had answered in the affirmative. Passage did not mean the answer is in, since a number of states have filed lawsuits against the federal government to repeal the requirement for all to have healthcare insurance; but the official answer for now could be construed as, yes.
Healthcare coverage for all Americans took over 100 years to achieve from the time the first president tried, Teddy Roosevelt, until Barack Obama was successful, although many supporters of reform believe it did not go far enough toward guaranteeing it as a right; many of whom believe healthcare should not be tied to employment. Leaving it associated with employment begs another question regarding rights, namely; whether full, living-wage employment for all (FLWEFA) is something that should be guaranteed by a nation.
By the middle of the twentieth century, nearly 100 million people had lost their lives to human violence, including wars, genocide, regional conflicts, harsh living conditions, work arrangements and abject poverty. Because of this, many of the world’s leaders assembled as part of the newly formed United Nations to declare a list of human rights, finalized on December 10, 1948. The list covers thirty rights, three of which, listed below, have to do with employment issues. [all can be found at: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html]

Article 23. (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
As you can see the United Nations stated that FLWEFA was a basic human right, however; all these decades later, the goal has been far from reached. This is surely one of those goals that may never be reached, but I do not hear much discussion of even trying to reach it. Many might argue FLWEFA will be one of the last things earth’s humans set as a goal, given all the other ongoing other struggles. One group has gone so far as to categorize the great issues facing humanity over the next few decades.
The Global Strategy Institute, part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sponsors an initiative called the Seven Revolutions, which is designed to raise awareness of seven areas within which people will need to seek to revolutionize current practices by 2025, or face grave consequences. Those areas are: (1) population, (2) resource management and environmental stewardship, (3) technological innovation and diffusion, (4) the development and dissemination of information and knowledge, (5) economic integration, (6) the nature and mode of conflict, and (7) the challenge of governance.

Erik Peterson, who has provided a toolkit for integrating the Seven Revolutions into various university curricula, elaborates on each category:
Population—shifts in the nature of the human family, including overall population level, rate of demographic growth, distribution of growth, age distribution, level of urbanization, and the profound asymmetries implicit in many of these demographic trends;
Strategic resource management—in the face of increasing population pressures and environmental sustainability limits, the challenge of meeting demand in food, water and energy;
Technology innovation and diffusion—exploring which technologies will have the greatest influence on changing our lives, with a view to innovations in computation, robotics, biotech and nanotech and a focus on convergence points between them;
Information and knowledge creation and dissemination—the remarkable opportunities and challenges associated with the exponential rise in the movement of data, information and knowledge across the planet;
Economic integration—implications of the continuation of the massive cross-border movements of goods, services, labor, capital and technology, and the volatility such integration engenders;
Conflict—the tremendous new complexities associated with addressing the erosion of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, traditional nuclear and radiological threats, the onset of new threats involving bio-terrorism, the rising specter of cyber-warfare, and the challenge of post-conflict reconstruction; and
Governance—in government, the private sector, civil society, or in the research and education fields, our capacity to organize ourselves to seize opportunities and mitigate risks in the longer run.
It is interesting to speculate on the relationship between FLWEFA and the seven revolutions. Clearly, population shifts have already and will continue to create mismatches between job applicant pools and jobs available, both at local levels and around the world.
Nebraska, Kansas, and other states declining in population have had trouble hanging on to highly motivated young people, who leave to work in areas more populated and with greater work possibilities. These people wind up settling and raising the next generation in metro areas and recently since both husband and wife work they have fewer children.
This has been repeated in many Westernized countries, while agricultural economies, which rely on more children, have diminished. In economies that have recently moved toward factories, larger numbers of children are still common which often means children are seen as sources of livelihood much as they were on farms but now the kids wind up in sweatshops, fighting wars or turning tricks.
If something such as Monster.com could match all the world's people in need of work to the available jobs, imagine how much education, training, orientation, corporate movement and reduction of migration barriers it would take. But of course, it would be a good thing right. The GWP would explode, as would the standard of living for most people. But do we have sufficient natural resources for this? Do we have the political will? Are we adroit enough at mixing ethnicities?
History says we would wind up fighting over resources, values differences, and national preservation, too much to pull it off.
But if we could turn over new leaves as global citizens and work through our social problems, we would be left with the daunting reality of too few resources for so much "progress". Which leads to the next revolution, that of, resource management and environmental stewardship.
Sticking with the goal of full, living-wage employment for all (FLWEFA) the world's people, we have to wonder what the carrying capacity of the planet would have to be for such an eventuality. The earth seems unable to carry us all now, and if everyone lived like the average American ecologists tell us we would need several more earths.
So we do not try for FLWEFA because the earth cannot carry us all and we intuitively know that, right? Hardly. It is more apt to say we do not try for it because that is not the way most people view the world. We do not set targets for all of mankind, considering ourselves too pragmatic for such a lofty goal. Instead, when it comes to jobs, it is each person for him or herself. We seldom consider the role fortunate accidents have played in the work we do. Those who reach high levels of professions have had education available, informal mentoring, opportunities to gain experience, and other forms of support.
At some point through technological innovation and diffusion, more widespread availability of information, economic integration, reduction of global conflict and an increase in global democracy, perhaps the world will be able to solve the FLWEFA problem and guarantee this right for all.
For now, however; perhaps as good as we can hope for will be to create a more democratic workplace for those fortunate enough to find employment. In June, 2008, Reuters reported the results of a survey suggesting a quarter of U.S. workers believe the place where they work is a dictatorship, less than half said their employer encouraged creativity, and only a little over half said they and their co-workers were motivated. We pride ourselves on living in a free and open society, in the U.S., but many of our workplaces can only be described as: “command and control”.
A hundred years ago innovative managers turned to scientific management to constrain variability out of worker performance, with the primary emphasis on efficiency. Today, the most innovative managers are seeking ways to restore the human imagination in their organizations, with effectiveness being the main goal. Efficiency is still important, but technology can virtually guarantee that; whereas effectiveness will require engagement of the heart and mind as well as the body of those performing the work.