Our Economic Human Rights

Perhaps it's the dog days of summer, or, more likely, the harsh realities of our current economic environment, but the poverty news is more and more of the same lately:  states running out of funds just as more and more people join the various assistance programs.  Legal aid faltering just as more people need help navigating the court system.  And so on.

If there was ever a time to revisit a more fundamental view of poverty and inequality, it's now.  Courtesy of regular contributor Jan Lightfootlane, I want to talk about economic human rights.  Jan recently joined anti-poverty activists from around the world to strategize around ending poverty at the conference, "Building the Unsettling Force: A National Conference to End Poverty."  The conference embraces the human rights framework to confront the intertwined, structural hardships that drive people into poverty and keep them there; workshops were organized around the human right to housing, the human right to healthcare, the human right to a living wage, and so on.  These rights are enshrined in the UN Convenant on Economic & Social Rights, a 1960s era document that the US has recognized but never fully ratified, leaving us as a nation ambivalent over whether our citizens have these rights as much as we enjoy the rights to free speech and political participation.

Support for these rights at home exists, but it is latent and not easily recognized.  But their legitimacy is fairly straightforward: if human rights are based on "dignity, equality and freedom," than how can we not wholeheartedly try to fulfill those rights in every way possible?  There's nothing dignified about homelessness.  We are not free when we toil for 18 hours per day at $6.55 an hour when we need $17 an hour just to pay our rent.  We are not equal when we can't access a good education because our public schools are crumbling and our parents cannot afford to move us into a better neighborhood, despite working two jobs a piece and doing the best they can.  Economic human rights require proactive action on behalf of governments and societies; it's not enough to just let someone be on their soapbox.  We must aggressively work towards providing a safe, affordable place to live for every resident in the US, as well as affordable, accessible healthcare and sufficient wages to cover the range of household expenses.

One thing we as activists can do is to consider a rights-based approach in our organizing, and to vocalize support for human rights activism to bring it into the mainstream, alongside calls for asset-building programs, better food bank models, and other more narrowly tailored fights.  We have canonized Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in this country, but we have not followed the path he laid out for us at the time of his death: to fight for the rights of poor people everywhere - in the US and abroad.  It's not merely about economic self-sufficiency, but about the dignity and right to full participation in society that only comes from a safe, sufficient and stable home and worklife.

"A home is not a profit-making venture, but a place to live." - Jan Lightfootlane, anti-poverty activist and Change.org member

(Photo of Vermont Human Right To Healthcare by NESRI)