Tomorrow at McGill Law: Panel on Distributive and Labour Justice

Catherine Lu of McGill and Pablo Gilabert of Concordia will be presenting on the topic of global principles of distributive and labour justice tomorrow at 12:30 pm as part of McGill Law's Speaker Series on Economic Justice, sponsored by the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. I will be moderating the discussion. This event is free and open to all, details:

Date: 14 March 2014
Time: 12:30-14:30
Location: Room 609 New Chancellor Day Hall
3644 rue Peel
Montreal Quebec Canada , H3A 1W9

I have started reading Catherine Lu's 2006 book, Just and Unjust Interventions in International Law: Public and Private. In it, she argues that the concept of state-to state intervention as a moral problem rests on an image of sovereignty as privacy, and therefore uses the same imagery of intrusion that we see in the domestic privacy context as a basic element. The domestic case against government intrusion into private affairs of individuals and social groups (family) involves balancing between curbing domestic abuse and government intruding too deeply into family lives.  Lu argues that the same principles animate the question of legitimacy in intervention, making similar normative claims to privacy accorded to families in the domestic realm. Lu thus argues that:

The concept of intervention .. assumes some distinction between private and public domains. In the Westphalian model of interstate relations, the posited sovereignty of states functions like privacy to give states a right to be free from interference by outside parties --especially other states, as well as non citizens, nongovernmental organizations, and even the international community -- in their own internal affairs."

The public/private argument is an interesting and I think controversial position that adds to a discourse about sovereignty that we see being challenged all the time in taxation, including (especially of late) in taxation. Consider the OECD's project on BEPS, the US imposition of FATCA on the rest of the world, the rise of global tax justice activism, the addition of taxation to the corporate social responsibility discourse, and the UN tax group's attempt to change the conversation on transfer pricing. There are many other examples in recent and not so recent history.

It will be interesting to discuss the pressures involved in the area of labour. I have viewed it as essentially necessary for states to trap labour in order to extract enough revenues to pay for the state (in the form of taxation or otherwise). It is clear that governments have come to rely on labour as their primary resource of such revenues over the past century, so cannot let labour move as capital does, footloose and free of obligation.