When discussing exploitation in workplaces, governments typically deploy a rhetoric of personal responsibility. They place attention on employers who take advantage of workers, or on workers who choose non-standard, precarious work arrangements. On this account, the responsibility of the state is to address the harm inflicted by private actors. This book questions the heavy focus on individual responsibility for precarious work and develops the concept of ‘state-mediated structural injustice at work’. The book uses a series of examples, such as migrant workers, captive workers, people under welfare conditionality schemes and other precarious workers, to show how the law creates structures of injustice, making exploitation long-term, standard and routine. It also assesses these examples against human rights principles – both civil and political and economic and social rights. The aim of the book is to show that both the overall structures and parts of those structures routinely lead to workers’ exploitation that may give rise to state responsibility for human rights violations, and that there is a pressing need for reform.

Please see further details here: www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/event/book-launch-structural-injustice-and-workers-rights.

This is a hybrid event. It will be held in-person in the Sir Joseph Hotung Auditorium at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. No registration is needed to attend in person. To attend the event online, please register in the link below.