Human rights principles must guide the way after covid19

When I told my parents that I wanted – no, that is not the right word – when I told my parents that I needed to study philosophy when I got to university, I was told that it was the most useless discipline that existed and that I should choose something more practical that had a career by which I could earn a living at the end of it.

Parental wisdom stated that any adult woman should be able to support not only herself, but also her children, and, if need be, her spouse if he became disabled, or, for one reason or another, was unable to work. Martin Luther’s famous dictum that philosophy was the devil’s mistress was quoted acerbically in a tone that implied I was choosing to jump head-first into the equivalent of a dangerous drug addiction..

Some years later, going to a large mental asylum outside the city to visit a classmate who had succumbed to that addiction, I only then began to understand the dangers of immersion in pure thought. With him, it was the works of Prof Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became the founder of a whole school of philosophy at Oxford.

He left it during the war and went to teach secondary school in the Austrian Alps, turning his back on the importance of the system of thought he had expounded in the Tractatus, expressing amusement at the seriousness of the proponents of the system he had escaped.

My addiction to the discipline of human rights that was just beginning to be taken seriously as an academic discipline at that time thankfully led me down a different path, one that, against all the gloomy prognostications of my elders and betters, led me to one of the most important aspects of human rights, and that is industrial relations. Even Oxford University, which, contrary to the claims of current critics does accommodate change, albeit slowly, through the works of such luminaries as ProfSir Otto Khan-Freund, QC, recognised industrial relations as an important element of human rights and by extension, of philosophy.

I finally came to accept that my elders and betters way back then were right.

Philosophy isolated by itself, encased in a silo of its own making, is pretty useless other than a distraction during long Sunday afternoons in lockdown. Human rights as a concept, like love as a concept, is useless. Unless these concepts move from thought and long hours of delicious discussion to action, they are not real love, as something you feel, or think you feel is not real until and unless it is reflected in action. The falsity of it is shown in the hypocrisy of someone raining physical , emotional or psychological blows on someone else while saying: "I am only doing this because I love you.” That is the lowest and most evil of self deceptions.

Likewise with human rights. Locking someone in prison because they are protesting for the right to vote or to express political opinions, or, as we have most recently seen, tell the truth about the covid19 pandemic under the guise of protecting others’ human right to a peaceful society. is on par with beating someone “for their own good.”

Industrial relations is a discipline that turns the concepts of human rights into action in the work place. Otherwise it is empty rhetoric…the kind of unstable, easily reversible political talk that foreign-affairs publications are sadly discovering now characterises the US, once known as “the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Industrial relations is intended to ensure that the principles of natural justice, the foundation of human rights, are not just words but are realities, recognising and ensuring the dignity of human beings and the equity of treatment by all to all in the workplace

This will be more important in the months to come than at any time since TT ratified the UN Universal Convention on Human Rights: standing up before all nations, so to speak, and promising to ensure that all its citizens would be treated with respect without distinction.

This means employees and employers, managers (and these days most managers are also employees) and those who are managed, men and women, skilled and unskilled.

It does not mean equal pay or promotion to equal status regardless of skill or responsibility, but it does mean equal pay for work of equal value and a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work: all the old clichés whose meanings we have lost sight of in the scramble for "team advantage."

Fitzgerald Hinds in a passionate letter to the press over the last weekend, defended his country against facile charges of official social and economic discrimination on grounds of race. He did it well.

A return to the dependency syndrome is not the answer, but when people feel they need more or want more just because they want it, that often becomes the only basis for their demands. That is not natural justice, nor a human right, nor good industrial relations.

Not all human rights and principles of natural justice are evident in our workplaces, but true industrial relations professionals on all sides of the spectrum over the next year will show themselves by working towards the survival of the common good, which implies economic survival and growth, not whining, economic blackmail or bullying.

"By their works ye shall know them.”