William Roth - Globalization, Social Justice, and the Helping Professions

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Globalization, Social Justice,
and the Helping Professions

Edited by

William Roth
and
Katharine Briar-Lawson

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2011 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu

Production by Kelli W. LeRoux
Marketing by Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Globalization, social justice, and the helping professions / edited by William Roth and Katharine Briar-Lawson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-3221-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4384-3220-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. GlobalizationSocial aspects. 2. GlobalizationEconomic aspects.

3. Social justice. 4. Social service. I. Roth, William, 1942 II. Briar-Lawson,
Katharine.

HM831.G56 2010

303.48'2dc22 2009054366

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Section I

CHAPTER 1

Globalization

Setting the Stage for a Social Justice Agenda

Katharine Briar-Lawson, William Roth, Blase Bonpane III, Maria C. Onetti-Bischoff, and Daniel Roth

This chapter introduces you to a book that we hope will serve to deepen your engagement with globalization and social justice issues. Designed for the human service professions, including social work and other counseling and community building fields, this book is also intended for practitioners in human service agencies, including those in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or in governmental posts. Unified by a social justice focus, which advances equitable access to basic human rights and resources, the human services can play a pivotal role locally and globally.

For some, engagement with globalization and social justice issues may entail becoming more informed about the changes across our planet that have had major effects on people and their environment. For others, engagement may compel research on impacts of globalization at home or in other nations. Engagement may involve organizing educational conferences, ethical purchasing, volunteerism and service learning, and work for related projects in communities, local and far away. Engagement may lead to fostering sustainable entrepreneurs and establishing support for worker-owned cooperatives, micro-lending firms, and fair-trade businesses. Moreover, engagement may suggest activism aimed at promoting changes in policies, programs, and practices of governments.

This book is also written as a tool to support human service professionals in their roles as change agents. Information is power and a tool of debate in order to guide change processes and inform progress charting and outcome improvements. Each of us can do our part to make our communities at home and across the world sustainable, equitable, and life enhancing. As social justice advocates, we must address the human costs of exclusionary dynamics, which create disparities in access to basic resources for survival.

A social justice perspective on globalization assumes that change for human and environmental betterment is not only possible but also urgently compelling. As we sign on as change agents, we embrace beliefs that people, communities, institutions, and nations can change and that human service practice can change. We do not see unnecessary death, starvation, social exclusion, abject poverty, and ethnic hatred or cleansing as inevitable but instead as challenges to larger human rights and social justice agendas, which compel study and informed action.

The authors in this book present various views on globalization along a spectrum of peoples' grassroots globalization to corporate globalization (Danaher and Burbach 2000). This book will reveal some of the impacts of corporate power and some valuable perspectives on communities and practices, as well as organizations that globalize economic, environmental, and social justice. We make a case that skill in human services work includes making connections between the global impacts of our local work and the local impacts of our global work.

Global Challenges

Each year the United Nations issues the Human Development Report, which examines progress across the world in a number of areas such as schooling, sanitation, and employment. The report describes a world that is deeply divided by extreme wealth and extreme deprivation.

• Nearly half the world's people, 2.7 billion, are living on less than $2 a day (The World Bank Group 2000).
• Two billion people will be added to the earth's human population over the next thirty years. Another one billion will be added over the following twenty years. All of this increase will occur in developing countries (The World Bank Group 2000).
• The average income in the richest twenty countries is now thirty-seven times that in the poorest twenty, a ratio that has doubled in the last forty years.
• While the numbers of the world's peoples living in extreme poverty are slowly decreasing, rising inequalities persist (UNDP 2002, 13).
• The United States has 5 percent of the world's people, yet consumes over 25 percent of the world's resources.
• Fifty-four countries are poorer than they were in 1990; thirty-four of those fifty-four countries have declining life expectancy rates; fourteen of those fifty-four countries have increasing mortality rates for children under the age of fourteen (UNDP 2003, 2).
• Inequities such as the following:
  • A newborn in Afghanistan has a one in four chance of dying before the age of five, compared to a newborn in Japan who has a 50 percent chance of living to the age of a hundred years (UNDP 2002, 13).
  • Worldwide, 171 million children are employed in hazardous work conditions (UNICEF 2006).
  • As many as 8.4 million children are caught up in one or more of the following: slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, forced military recruitment, prostitution. and pornography (ILO 2004).

However, such statistics may mask the depth and the reality of profound human suffering. Injustices, such as those cited above, tear at the fabric of our communities and nations. Moreover, inequalities have life and death consequences (Wilkinson 1996). The statistics, nonetheless, may help to move us to action.

In 2000, the UN adopted the Millennium Declaration that seeks global integration based on equity, social justice, and human rights (UNDP 2005). In 2005, the UN declared the following eight Millennium Development Goals, included cutting extreme poverty in half and providing universal primary education by 2015:

eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal education goals, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development. (UNDP 2005, 39)

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