Labor’s role in forging and sustaining democracies has long been recognized in international human rights law and social science literature, but union rights and density are declining around the globe, and unfavorable domestic law jurisprudence in many parts of the globe has undermined collective rights. This chapter explores the juxtaposition of labor’s exalted place in international human rights law with its subordinate position in domestic law. In international human rights instruments and jurisprudence, labor unions hold a special position, and freedom of association is the critical foundational right upon which other rights and interests are advanced. In social science literature labor unions have pro-democracy attributes. This chapterexplores whether the decline in union strength has created a political void that has been filled by more authoritarian tendencies.

This volume comes together at a time when democracy on a global scale is facing its greatest challenges in eighty years and is under siege in every region of the world by autocratic leaders and parties. After thirty years of steady democratic advances in much of the world during the latter decades of the twentieth century (Huntington 1991; O’Donnell & Schmitter 1986; Roberts 2016), Freedom House has documented a decline in civil and political rights in both newly established and long-standing democratic regimes since the early 2000s, characterizing this trend as “democracy in retreat” on the global stage (Freedom House 2019: 1). This downward spiral continued and intensified over the second decade of the twenty-first century, with autocratic leaders pursuing unchecked power and demonizing political and cultural minorities, producing destabilizing effects around the globe (V-Dem Institute 2021).