"The role of industry, the university and social movements in improving global working conditions"

Introduction:

John Hennessy, President and Bing Presidential Professor

Moderator:

Josh Cohen, Director of the Program on Global Justice at freeman Spogli Institute for Internaioanl Studies and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law

Panelists:

Auret van Heerden, President and CEO, Fair Labor Association

Scott Nova, Executive Director, Workers Rights Consortium

David Brady, Bowen H. & Janice Arthur McCoy Prof in Leadership Values, Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor in Public Policy, Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Senior Fellow by Courtesy

Debra Satz,Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science

Hayagreeva Rao, Atholl McBean Professor of Organiztion Behavior and Human Resources

Professor Brown's fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory, and cultural theory (including feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory). She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Brown's current work focuses on the relationship of political sovereignty to global capital and other transnational forces, including those associated with religion, law, culture and moral discourse.

Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Brown's books include Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), Left Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (Duke, 2002), Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2006). She has lectured widely in Europe and North America, has held a number of distinguished visiting lectureships, and has recently been a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a UC Berkeley Humanities Fellow.

Before coming to CDDRL, Miriam Abu Sharkh was employed at the United Nation's specialized agency for work, the International Labour Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. As the People's Security Coordinator (P4), she analyzed and managed large household surveys from Argentina to Sri Lanka. She also worked on the Report on the World Social Situation for the United Nation's Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York. Previously, she had also been a consultant for the German national development agency (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) in Germany where she focused on integrating core labor standards into German technical cooperation.

She has written on the spread and effect of human rights related labour standards as well as on welfare regimes, gender discrimination, child labour, social movements and work satisfaction.

Currently, she holds a grant by the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to study the evolvement of worldwide patterns of gender discrimination in the labor market, specifically the effects of international treaties. These questions are addressed in longitudinal, cross-national studies from the 1950´s to today.

This research builds on her previous work as a Post-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL as well as her dissertation on child labor for which she received a "Summa cum Laude" ( Freie Universität Berlin, Germany-joint dissertation committee with Stanford University). After discussing various labor standard initiatives, the dissertation analyzes when and why countries ratify the International Labour Organization's Minimum Age Convention outlawing child labour via event history models. It then examines the effect of ratification on child labor rates over three decades through a panel analyses. While her dissertation employed quantitative methods, her Diplom thesis (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) builds on extensive fieldwork in South Africa examining the genesis, strategies, and structures of the South African women's movement.

This is a CDDRL's Special Research Seminar within our Democracy in Taiwan Program. In this seminar, Dr. Szu-chien Hsu will explore whether "democracy" is really perceived differently in today's China in comparison with in the West. And if there is different perception, what are the implications for China's prospect of democratic reform?

Dr. Szu-chien Hsu is an Assistant Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica. Dr. Hsu's research interests include China's political reform, China's "developmental state" in high-tech economic sectors, and cross-strait relations. On China's political reform, Dr. Hsu is analyzing how the Hu-Wen administration conducts reforms on political institutions as an adaptation of the authoritarian regime. The analysis focuses on how the intrinsic institutional principles of the party-state condition and the path and scope of Hu's political reform. Szu-chien Hsu earned his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in the City of New York in 1997.

**Paper is available upon request.**

Professor Song is presently an Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California at Berkley. She is a graduate of K-12 public schools and Harvard College, where she majored in Social Studies. She received her M. Phil in Politics from Oxford University and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to Berkeley, she taught in the Political Science Department at M.I.T.

Her fields of interest include political and legal theory and the history of modern political thought. Her research focuses on issues of citizenship, immigration and diversity.

Her book Justice, Gender and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), explores the justice of minority group rights and multicultural policies with a focus on their effects on the rights of women. Her current research examines different ideals of citizenship reflected in immigrant integration policies in North America and Western Europe.

Her recent publications include Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality, in American Political Science Review(2005): La défense par la culture en droit American( The cultural defense in American law) Critique internationale (2005) andReligious Freedom v. Sex Equality in Theory and Research in Education (2006)

Co-sponsered with the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop in Global Justice

Abstract:

Contemporary political theory debates about multiculturalism largely take for granted that it is "culture" and "cultural groups" that are to be recognized and accommodated. Yet, the discussion tends to draw on a wide range of examples involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race. My paper attempts to disaggregate the variety of claims typically associated with multiculturalism.