Working on Rights

This series will trace at the example of work the historical connections between regions and critically engage with the idea of the North Atlantic World as normal and the rest as exceptional. The aim is to publish studies that change focus back and forth from the intimacy and complexity of relationships in specific places and their connections to distant places and long-term processes of change thereby looking beyond locality and region.

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This book is first to connect global labor history and the history of human rights: By focusing on democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland between 1960 and 1990, it shows how workers in authoritarian regimes addressed repression and whether they developed a language of rights in the light of a globally dynamic human rights discourse. The study argues that the democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland were both variants of emancipatory and democracy oriented social movements with global interconnections that emerged in the 1960s. It reveals that the demands for free and independent trade unions, which in both countries became a flashpoint in the fight for broader democratic demands, was not always discussed in rights terms, but rather presented as an inevitable necessity. At the same time, these labor movements and their intellectual allies morally delegitimized state repression against workers and thereby employed the concepts of democracy, participation, solidarity, progress and eventually, rights. Integrating the history of two European semi-peripheric societies into a broader narrative, this book is relevant for readers interested in global labor history, human rights history and the history of democratization in Europe in the late Twentieth Century.