Eleanor Roosevelt’s Legacy: How the World Recognized Workers’ Right as Human...
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This year has seen uprisings around the world demanding rights. Eleanor Roosevelt recognized those rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Tomorrow we celebrate the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. This year is especially significant. Thousands of people surged through the streets of Cairo as the Arab Spring emerged, challenging dictators across the Middle East. Here at home thousands of workers gathered in the streets of Wisconsin and Ohio fighting an unprecedented attack on labor unions. Workers joined with the unemployed as Occupy Wall Street and the 99% moved from New York City across the country to shut down the Port of Oakland. Economic inequality became the subject of media, new and old. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich reminded us, employee pay is now down to its smallest share of the economy, while corporate profits make up the largest share of the economy since the start of the Great Depression. Average citizens around the world are standing up for their human rights: political, civil, economic, and social.
Often overlooked in this time of reflection on human rights is the inclusion of workers’ rights and the role of unions. On April 25, 1945, delegates from around the world met in San Francisco to begin deliberations on a charter for the United Nations. In an unprecedented move, over 40 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were invited to participate. Only seven NGOs were then given consultative status to attend meetings, suggest agenda items, and present positions to the Economic and Social Council. Three of them were labor groups: the AF of L, the World Federation of Trade Unions, where the CIO played a leading role, and the International Confederation of Christian Trade Unions representing European unions. Phil Murray, president of the CIO, said that he represented all of labor when he gave his full support for including human rights in the charter and establishing a Human Rights Commission, both of which were accomplished.
That same year, after President Roosevelt’s death, President Truman asked Eleanor Roosevelt to become a delegate to the United Nations. The UN established a commission to bring nations together to agree on some very basic principles, and he asked Mrs. Roosevelt to chair the effort. Just as Doris Kearns Goodwin describes Lincoln as orchestrating a team of political rivals, ER, as she often signed her name, guided a complex international team of philosophers, lawyers, politicians, diplomats, and trade unionists to develop the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They addressed economic and social rights, as well as political and civil rights, for the first time.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a very proud and public member of a labor union. As a working journalist, she joined the American Newspaper Guild in 1936 and had her union card in her wallet when she died in 1962. When she went to the United Nations, she worked closely with David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Mathew Woll of the Photoengravers Union, Jim Carey of the CIO, and Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League. The AF of L hired Toni Sender, a journalist and politician who had fled Nazi Germany, to be its full-time staff person at the UN. Together, they made strong arguments for the specific inclusion of trade union rights in the document and they addressed the closed shop and the right to strike. ER explained that the United States delegation considered that “the right to form and join trade unions was an essential element of freedom.” While fighting against the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act at home, under her guidance Article 23 declared that everyone, without discrimination, has the right to a decent job, fair working conditions, a living wage, equal pay for equal work, protection against unemployment, and the right to join a union.
The General Assembly met in Paris in 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed on December 10 with 48 votes in favor and none against. ER thanked the unions for their help and they acknowledged her contributions when Phil Murray sent a letter supporting Eleanor Roosevelt’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Declaration remains one of her greatest accomplishments and the cornerstone of today’s powerful human rights movement.
Practicing what she preached, ER told striking members of the IBEW that “everyone who is a worker should join a labor organization.” She came to believe this was true for workers in the public sector as well as in the private sector. She argued for full employment at home and economic aid abroad. For her, all employees around the world had a right to a decent job and a voice at work, without fear of harassment or intimidation. But when asked “Where, after all, do human rights begin?” she answered, “In small places close to home… the neighborhood… the school or college… the factory, farm or office… unless they have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”
Eleanor Roosevelt’s voice resonates today with a call for reform not only to achieve economic gains, but to restore a basic element of democracy to women and men who work for a living. And as she told the delegates at a CIO convention, “We can’t just talk. We have got to act… And we must see improvement for the masses of people, not for the little group on top.” International Human Rights Day is a call to action for the 99% across the country and around the world.
Brigid O’Farrell is an independent scholar. This blog draws on her most recent book, She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker, now available in paperback from Cornell University Press.
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