Scholars of the labor market have persuasively demonstrated that work has become more precarious, flexible, and poorly remunerated over the past four decades. Hazard or Hardship makes a compelling case that it has also become more dangerous. Jeffrey Hilgert argues that the development of a global framework on the “right to refuse” unsafe work since the 1970s has—contradictorily—actually weakened labor protections and entrenched the rights and power of private businesses and employers. By creating procedural burdens and restrictions that impede protections for workers who refuse to perform unsafe tasks assigned to them at their jobs, he argues, the creation of public, global labor standards such as the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention 155 on Occupational Health and Safety have contracted workers’ individual and collective employment rights.

Some readers may be surprised by this conclusion. Within the literature on global labor standards, there is a tendency to assume that standards enshrined in public international law afford the greatest protection for workers. In contrast to private labor standards—including voluntary codes of conduct, certifications, and standards developed by multinational corporations, nongovernmental organiations, and multistakeholder coalitions—instruments such as ILO Conventions are ratified by nation-states that have accepted the convention as legally binding. Public international labor standards are thus widely understood to be the most stringent of available global regulatory instruments to protect workers, in spite of ongoing challenges related to their enforcement, especially in countries economically dependent on low-cost manufacturing. Hilgert’s argument that the development of a global framework on workers’ health and safety actually had a negative impact on worker protection is thus a unique and important one.

Hilgert traces the institutional processes that created a global framework to govern workers’ right to refuse unsafe work beginning in the late 1970s. His analysis centers on the negotiations that led to the ILO Convention 155 of 1981, the first international labor standard to deal with the rights of workers in relation to unsafe work, currently ratified by 64 countries. Although workers’ movements and their representatives within the ILO proposed to bolster workers’ rights by enshrining antidiscrimination and anti-retaliation protections for workers who refused unsafe work, the author suggests, corporate actors and some government representatives obstructed these efforts.

Hilgert claims that the ILO’s Employers Group pushed for the devolution of governments’ historic responsibility for protecting and enforcing worker health and safety onto individual employers, and mobilized a new discourse around “employer responsibility” to justify weakening workers’ rights. Invoking principles of neoclassical economics, industry actors also argued that hazards were inherent in various jobs, which workers acknowledged at the time of entering into employment contracts. Ultimately, the employers triumphed, transforming workers’ right to refuse unsafe work from “a component of workers’ freedom of association” to “a matter of individual employment policy” (p. 15), and creating legal, financial, and administrative barriers that limit workers’ “access to real world social justice” (p. 83).

Scholars familiar with the tripartite structure of the ILO will not be surprised to learn that the Employers Group exerted disproportionate power within standard-setting negotiations. The book’s original insight is that industry and government actors used a global labor standard as a tool to facilitate a U.S.-led, neoliberal model of economic globalization. As Hilgert observes, Convention 155 enshrined “global labor rights policy that was not safe for workers, but instead was safe for private enterprise, managerial rights, and the liberalization of trade policy” (p. 121). He argues that it thus comprised an early example of the use of global labor standards to advance and consolidate market-based policy models associated with the Washington Consensus.

This is an important theme for scholars of global standards. The literature on labor and environmental standards is immense. But in recent years, it has evolved along highly technical lines of inquiry, with scholars focused on evaluating the impacts and effectiveness of individual standards and how these could be improved. Hilgert’s argument that rather than helping to protect workers from the impacts of globalization, an ILO Convention actually enshrined the rights of employers and facilitated a U.S.-model of global economic integration underlines the need to delve deeper into the normative and political dimensions of both public and private standards. In particular, it pushes us to look beyond the strengths and weaknesses of individual standards to the role of standards in engineering or stabilizing broader political economic relations, and especially, to facilitating models of corporate profitability.

Hilgert’s detailed empirical analysis of the political contestations surrounding health and safety labor standards is impressive. But I found the argument underdeveloped theoretically. The book’s conceptual framework is anchored in an analysis of mobilization bias in labor policy and an interpretation of Steven Lukes and John Gaventa’s three-dimensional conception of power. This framework usefully sheds light into labor and employer positions in negotiations within the ILO and national policy spheres under discussion. However, it does little to illuminate the broader role and power of the social forces that shaped these negotiations, or the political contestations of which they were a part—in particular, the wave of national labor-market policy across the 1970s and 1980s that sought to undermine working-class power and overturn the gains that workers had made during the postwar period, as these came to be seen as barriers to profitability.

No doubt, the book has been written with a labor studies and human rights audience in mind—not scholars of political economy or international relations. But in overlooking these macrostructural power relations and contestations, the author falls short of offering a compelling explanation as to why industry actors were so eager to disempower workers, and why government policymakers and the ILO were willing to facilitate this. Rather than the sporadic and undefined use of concepts like “disciplinary neoliberalism” and “neo-liberal policy” throughout the work, an engagement with the sizable literatures on the role and contestations among industry, governments, and workers in the construction of a neoliberal global economic order would have helpfully uncovered the commonalities between Convention 155 and broader policy shifts during the period.

Overall, Hazard or Hardship makes a compelling case that by eliminating legal protections for workers who refuse unsafe work, governments have undermined individual workers’ legitimacy and power to determine which work is too dangerous to perform. It raises provocative questions about the role of the ILO in facilitating this rebalancing of power from workers to employers. In the face of surging fatalities from factory fires, workplace accidents, and collapsing buildings, Hilgert’s book offers a much-needed explanation for why workers are unable to refuse unsafe work, and how we could have prevented this situation.