Today, hazardous work kills 2.3 million people each year and injures millions more. Among the most compelling yet controversial forms of legal protection for workers is the right to refuse unsafe work. The rise of globalization, precarious work, neoliberal politics, attacks on unions, and the idea of individual employment rights have challenged the protection of occupational health and safety for workers worldwide. In Hazard or Hardship, Jeffrey Hilgert presents the protection of refusal rights as a moral and a human rights question.

Hilgert finds that the protection of the right to refuse unsafe work, as constituted under international labor standards, is a failure and calls for a reexamination of worker health and safety policy from the ground up. The current model of protection follows an individual employment rights framework, which fails to protect workers against the inherent social inequalities within the employment relationship. To adequately protect the right to refuse as a human right, both in North America and around the world, Hilgert argues that a broader protection must be granted under a freedom of association framework. Hazard or Hardship will be a welcome resource for labor and environmental activists, trade union leaders, labor lawyers and labor law scholars, industrial relations experts, human rights advocates, public health professionals, and specialists in occupational safety and health.

Jeffrey Hilgert's profile page

• Cowinner, 2014 Best Book in Human Rights Award (Hu

Jeffrey Hilgert is Assistant Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Montreal.

Hazard or Hardship uncovers an important path-not-taken in the world of workplace health and safety standards.... It speaks to an important set of issues in a resolute voice. It has influenced my own understanding of health-and-safety regulation, and I believe it will be similarly helpful for other scholars of domestic and global labor standards.

Social Forces

This book charts an important but hitherto neglected aspect of social protection in the field of occupational health and safety?the right of workers to refuse unsafe work. The right to refuse unsafe work should be inalienable in societies that respect and value their citizens, and it should be defined and institutionally facilitated so it can be exercised in a meaningful way.... This is a valuable book.

British Journal of Industrial Relations