Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I had never actually read this fully, and thought it would be important given so much of the current public debate and news regarding human rights. It was absolutely worth it, given some of the big challenges and changes society will be facing during the next 100 years, and how they will interact with this document.

Take Article 23 for example:

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

The idea of one’s work as an essential part of one’s identity is, up to this point in history, assumed and fundamental. Yet with today’s debate on the future of work this may change or be threatened. While the exploration of workers during the last few centuries was a consistent theme, we may in the next few centuries see a dismissal of the need of workers. What will happen if workers go from essential to irrelevant? How will this interact with the human right to work? It is many of these sticky future and present issues that make revising this document important.