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This chapter considers the experiences of practitioners who work inside and around the international human rights legal system. Those insider views—many of them from lawyers who have one foot in academia and another in the practical efforts of nongovernmental organizations and international legal bodies—point to many similar findings. They see a system in which legal obligations and membership have expanded much faster than the capacity to yield practical improvements in human rights. According to many of these practitioners, the legal system has been extremely successful at declaring universal values, yet has fallen quite short in practical implementation. The chapter discusses some good news regarding the impact of international treaties and legal customs on constitutions, national law, and domestic politics, as well as some barriers to a more effective human rights legal system; for example, insider politics and underused or ineffective complaints mechanisms.

Indiana shocked the labor movement in 1957 by becoming the first northern industrialized state to pass right-to-work. This chapter analyzes the campaigns waged by business and labor in order to understand how business succeeded in such a highly unionized state. Poor organization and an effective countermovement combined to sink labor in Indiana. Unions in Indiana were politically weak and disorganized at the height of the capital–labor accord. Labor’s insider and outsider strategies were haphazard in comparison to the sophisticated business-led effort spearheaded by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and the newly formed Indiana Right-to-Work Committee (INRTWC). The outcome of the campaign provided a jolt of confidence to business leaders and led to a surge in right-to-work activity nationally.

This chapter traces the development of the first statewide public-sector collective bargaining legislation in Wisconsin in 1959 and the campaign waged by municipal employees there. The case for public-sector rights lacked the fanfare of the campaigns in Indiana and Ohio, though it was clearly shaped by the political winds surrounding these efforts. Well before the upsurge of civil rights–inspired public-sector organizing in the 1960s and 1970s, bargaining rights in Wisconsin were rooted in the 1950s fights over labor rights. The success of the public-sector union campaign in Wisconsin is mostly a story of political opportunity. It was after more than a decade of public-sector advocates organizing and introducing bills in the legislature, and after the overreach of business activists on right-to-work in the region, that dissension within the Republican Party and between party leaders and business circles provided the opening that activists needed.