SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS: A BRIEF GUIDE TO THE CONSTITUTION OF WORK AND LIVELIHOODS

Abstract

Work and livelihoods; poverty and dependency; economic security and insecurity: for most of our history, their constitutional importance was self‐evident. The framers of 1789 had no doubt that personal liberty and political equality demanded a measure of economic independence and material security. In the wake of industrialization and urbanization, generations of reformers declared that America needed a “new economic constitutional order” and a “second Bill of Rights,” securing the old promises of individual freedom, opportunity, and well‐being via new government duties and new social and economic rights. Yet today, with the important exception of employment discrimination, work, livelihoods, and the material bases of membership in the community have vanished from the constitutional landscape. That is a scandal; for the U.S. is no different from other nations: constitutional democracy is impossible here, just as it is elsewhere, without some limits on social and economic deprivation. Nonetheless, “welfare rights,” as most Americans understand them, have been tried and rejected; “redistribution” is more likely to seem constitutionally suspect than constitutionally commanded. Using history and contemporary experience, this short essay tries to answer that question how, if at all, should the Constitution be interpreted to safeguard social rights or a social minimum in the twenty‐first century?