International Wage Disparities, Resource Depletion and Human Rights: Are They Linked?

Abstract

Despite a growing acknowledgement of inequality’s impact on the realisation of human rights, an international ‘equal pay for equal work’ principle is missing from human rights discourse, including the discourse of human rights practitioners and scholars who have highlighted human rights silence on vertical inequalities. The article asserts that this silence may be informed by the neoclassical assumption that disparities of wage are determined by the marginal productivity of labour. Moreover, the article argues that wage differential infringes on environmental rights, as it forces low-wage economies to exchange more of their resources for fewer resources through Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE).