Support our Economic Human Rights
Support our Economic Human Rights
The Issue
The economic human rights framework allows activists to simultaneously confront the social structures that drive people into poverty and keep them there AND our individual and collective needs for and responsibilities to provide a good education, a safe place to live, and a stable place of work.
Economic human rights include: the human right to housing, the human right to healthcare, and the human right to a living wage. 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. 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? Economic human rights require proactive action on behalf of governments and societies; 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.
Fighting poverty is not just about income deprivation or about economic self-sufficiency. It's about the dignity and right to full participation in society that only comes from a safe, sufficient and stable home and worklife.
(Photo from NESRI, of VT human right to healthcare rally, May 2009)
The Issue
The economic human rights framework allows activists to simultaneously confront the social structures that drive people into poverty and keep them there AND our individual and collective needs for and responsibilities to provide a good education, a safe place to live, and a stable place of work.
Economic human rights include: the human right to housing, the human right to healthcare, and the human right to a living wage. 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. 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? Economic human rights require proactive action on behalf of governments and societies; 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.
Fighting poverty is not just about income deprivation or about economic self-sufficiency. It's about the dignity and right to full participation in society that only comes from a safe, sufficient and stable home and worklife.
(Photo from NESRI, of VT human right to healthcare rally, May 2009)
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Petition created on August 18, 2009