While the specific focus of these remarks is on matters of a practical and highly timely nature – a critique of policies of government related to the current economic crisis – the recent social encyclicals express ideas that bear on the same issue, and where that the encyclicals provide...

The paper gives an overview of the global labor debate. In the first part we summarize the debate on globalization and labor, followed by a discussion on two contested issues of global labor regulation. These are first the effectiveness of soft law and second the issue of labor rights as...