Economic and Social Rights
An injured meatpacking worker at home with her husband. The serious injury rate in the meatpacking industry is about five times the national average, making it the most dangerous job in America. © 1999 Eugene Richards / VII
Economic and social rights22 relate to the right of all humans to the basic necessities of life, including but not limited to food, water, social security, clothing, health care, education, and housing.23 Businesses have affected this category of rights in myriad ways.
Human Rights Watch research provides several examples of business conduct that has negatively affected economic and social rights, including the following:
- A US company has declined to halt supplies of bulldozers that the Israeli army has used in the occupied Palestinian territories to raze homes, destroy agriculture, and shred roads in violation of the laws of war and with serious consequences for people’s access to adequate food and housing.24
- Employers in Ukraine have arbitrarily limited economic opportunities for women, perpetuating poverty and reinforcing discrimination.25
- Construction employers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have subjected their employees to housing and working conditions dangerous to their health and safety and failed to accurately report worker injuries and deaths.26
- US meatpacking-industry employers have prevented workers who suffer injuries from seeking treatment at plant health clinics unless their wounds were traumatic and visible.27
- Transnational labor recruitment agencies based in Indonesia have confined prospective domestic workers at training facilities for months in overcrowded and unsanitary facilities where women have little or no access to health care, are deprived of adequate food and rest, and at times suffer physical and sexual abuse as well as anxiety and depression associated with their ill-treatment.28
- A Taiwanese company dumped toxic waste in Cambodia, which led to at least one death and undermined local residents’ rights to environmental, health, and livelihood protections.29
- Government-managed cotton cooperatives used hazardous pesticides in Egypt’s cotton fields without adequate protection for the child laborers whose health was at risk.30
- Plantations in El Salvador have employed children to carry out inherently dangerous work in sugarcane fields, endangering their right to health.31
- Businesses in El Salvador, Ecuador, Egypt, and the United States have undermined working children’s right to an education by limiting their ability to attend school.32
Additional examples show that businesses have also negatively impacted people’s right to water, which can also affect their rights to life, health, food, and livelihood:
- A US energy company’s diversion of large quantities of water left villagers in India with barely enough water to sustain themselves, sparking protests that were then systematically suppressed.33
- US agricultural employers have not provided child workers with adequate drinking water and sanitation facilities, with serious negative effects on the children’s health.34
- Pollution from Nigeria’s oil industry has severely affected the livelihood of local communities, ruining crops, destroying fishing grounds, and damaging drinking water supplies.35
Two examples detailed below illustrate additional impacts.
Forgotten Schools: Right to Basic Education for Children on Farms in South Africa36
In a 2004 report on South Africa, Human Rights Watch examined public schools located on private commercial farms that are the only accessible sites of education for many children who live on the farms with their parents or relatives. The investigation found that, despite some efforts to improve practices, farm owners’ actions were interfering with many children’s ability to attend school.
These South African farm schools, which at the time constituted 13 percent of all state-funded schools and educated approximately 3 percent of public school students, are a legacy of the apartheid era. At the end of the apartheid period, half of the African children living on white-owned commercial farms were not enrolled in school. Whereas farm owners originally established and managed schools as they saw fit, efforts were made starting in 1994 to convert the farm schools to ordinary government-managed public schools with limited farm owner responsibility.
Human Rights Watch’s report revealed that some private farm owners were deliberately obstructing children’s physical access to schools or preventing schools from functioning by suspending their water supply. In other cases, farm owners had closed schools in an attempt to evict workers whose children attended the farm school on their property. While government officials and police occasionally intervened in such cases to try to ensure children’s access to schools, such interventions were often insufficient.
Without Remedy: Human Rights Abuse and Indonesia’s Pulp and Paper Industry37
The massive pulp and paper industry located in Riau province on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, has decimated huge swathes of Sumatra’s lowland and tropical forests. A 2003 Human Rights Watch report showed that the environmental destruction also harmed the local population, which is largely rural, poor, and dependent on the forests for its livelihood.
Many local communities in Riau use the affected lands for subsistence and for commercial cultivation of dryland rice and tree crops, while millions of others depend on income from rubber or other forest products. Human Rights Watch found that the wholesale destruction of forests by pulp and paper companies in Riau, together with their reliance on employees from outside the province, made it increasingly difficult for members of forest-dependent communities to seek a livelihood and adequate standard of living. These problems were compounded for indigenous communities for whom the forests hold great cultural value.
When community members attempted to directly challenge company practices, they faced unresponsive courts and unaccountable and often brutal government security forces and company-sponsored militias. Corruption contributed to the government’s failure to protect those seeking to investigate and publicize human rights abuses and environmental crimes.
22 In discussing categories of rights, cultural rights are often grouped together with economic and social rights, most obviously in the ICESCR. In this report, we have opted to address cultural rights explicitly in the section on the rights of communities or groups. Cultural rights, like all rights, remain interdependent and interconnected. For example many economic and social rights such as the rights to food, water and health have direct implications for the right to life and right to bodily and personal integrity.
23 See, for example, right to education at UDHR, art. 26(1), ICESCR, arts. 13(1), 13(2), and CRC, art. 28(1); right to health at UDHR, art. 25(1), and ICESCR, art. 12; right to housing at UDHR, art. 25(1), and ICESCR, art. 11(1); right to necessary social services and social security at UDHR, arts. 22, 25(1), ICESCR, art. 9, and CRC, art. 26(1); right to food at UDHR, art. 25(1), and ICESCR, art. 11(1); right to clothing at UDHR, art. 25(1), and ICESCR, art. 11(1); right to water, including sanitation, at UDHR, art. 25(1), and ICESCR, art. 11(1); and right to an adequate standard of living at UDHR, art. 25(1), and ICESCR, art. 11(1). These rights also are reflected in other core human rights instruments that specifically address them in relation to the elimination and prevention of discrimination.
24 Human Rights Watch, Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004), http://hrw.org/reports/2004/rafah1004/, see, for example, pp. 2-3, 10-12, 94-101, 10-110, 113-115; see also, letter from Human Rights Watch to Caterpillar, Inc., October 29, 2004, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/11/22/isrlpa9706.htm; “Israel: Caterpillar Should Suspend Bulldozer Sales,” Human Rights Watch news release, November 23, 2004, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/11/22/isrlpa9711.htm.
25 Human Rights Watch, Women’s Work: Discrimination Against Women in the Ukrainian Labor Force, vol. 15, no. 5(D), August 2003, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/ukraine0803/index.htm, pp. 3-4, 8-10, 18-38.
26 Human Rights Watch, Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates, vol. 18, no. 8(E), November 2006, http://hrw.org/reports/2006/uae1106/index.htm, pp. 8-9, 21-24, 40-45.
27 Human Rights Watch, Blood, Sweat, and Fear, pp. 42, 54, 57, 65, 74.
28 Human Rights Watch, Help Wanted: Abuses against Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, vol. 16, no. 9(C), July 2004, http://hrw.org/reports/2004/indonesia0704/, pp. 33, 78.
29 Human Rights Watch, Toxic Justice: Human Rights, Justice and Toxic Waste in Cambodia, vol. 11, no. 2(c), May 1999, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/cambotox/, pp. 6-9, 10-11, 25-33.
30 Human Rights Watch, Underage and Unprotected, pp. 11, 16-18. See also, for example, Human Rights Watch, Tainted Harvest: Child Labor and Obstacles to Organizing on Ecuador’s Banana Plantations (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2002), http://hrw.org/reports/2002/ecuador/2002ecuador.pdf, pp. 24-37; Human Rights Watch, Fingers to the Bone, pp. 16-22, 25-26.
31 Human Rights Watch, Turning a Blind Eye: Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador’s Sugarcane Cultivation, vol. 16, no. 2(B), June 2004, http://hrw.org/reports/2004/elsalvador0604/elsalvador0604.pdf, pp. 11, 16-19.
32 Human Rights Watch, Turning a Blind Eye, pp. 41-43; Human Rights Watch, Tainted Harvest, pp. 44-47; Human Rights Watch, Underage and Unprotected, p. 13; Human Rights Watch, Fingers to the Bone, pp. 48-50.
33 Human Rights Watch, The Enron Corporation, pp. 45-46.
34 Human Rights Watch, Fingers to the Bone, pp. 2, 26-30.
35 Human Rights Watch, The Price of Oil, pp. 7, 53-74.
36 Human Rights Watch, Forgotten Schools: Right to Basic Education for Children on Farms in South Africa, vol. 16, no. 7(A), May 2004, http://hrw.org/reports/2004/southafrica0504/southafrica0504.pdf, pp. 1-3, 8-13, 15, 20-23, 35-37.
37 Human Rights Watch, Without Remedy, pp. 3-5, 9-12, 30, 33-36, 46-49, 64-66.