Living Wage Analysis

After the complete economic debacle of 2002, Argentina is enjoying a substantial recovery and real wages are at their best level ever. Yet, they still have considerable ground to cover before becoming of a living-wage kind; a goal that is realistically attainable in less than a decade if Argentina is able to sustain the current trend and control inflation

Argentina traditionally enjoyed the highest standard of living in Iberian America for most of the XX century. It had the most literate and well fed population, vast agricultural and mineral resources and a large immigration force eager to thrive in this new land. In the first part of the century, although the economy was heavily dependant for foreign exchange on the export of agricultural products, Argentina was considered one of the richest countries in the world. Real wages had a very favourable gap vis-a-vis real wages in many countries in Europe, a factor that attracted millions of European immigrants to populate much of its, until then, scarcely populated territory.

However, during the second part of the century, despite its focus on industrialisation through import substitution, Argentina experienced a long period of recurring political and economic crises, with high inflation rates becoming a permanent feature of its economy. Military coups, deteriorating terms of trade for its agricultural exports and an inconclusive import substitution strategy did not allow Argentina to become a developed economy and instead descended into a middle income economy with a deteriorated standard of living and increased inequality.

At the end of the eighties, and in line with the global trend, particularly radical in Iberian America, Argentina adopted the recipes of the so-called Washington Consensus. This entailed the imposition of the supply-side neoliberal mantra through trade liberalisation, privatisation and the reduction of the State to its minimum expression.

Under the new paradigm Argentina experienced a short bout of economic boom at the end of the century. But in 2001, the laissez-faire opening of Argentina’s economy actually resulted in its complete collapse due to the sheer speculative and predatory basis upon which it was anchored. With “el corralito” –the actual freezing of all bank deposits due to lack of funds provoked by massive capital flight– Argentina was forced to declare a credit default of its large and mostly securitised foreign debt. As a consequence, since 2003, Argentina has moved from sheer laissez-faire to far more cautious economic policies –with some measure of regulation, and a less privatised and a more demand-side economic approach.

As for the quality of wages, although real wages in Argentina since WWII were not nearly as good as they were in the first part of the century, they continued to be by far the highest in Iberian America and reflected low levels of inequality up to the mid seventies. To be sure, with the abandonment of demand-side economics in favour of a sheer neoclassical approach, real wages deteriorated substantially –except during the brief period of neoliberal GDP growth during the last decade of the past century, and inequality grew exponentially, particularly during the turn of the century until the economy collapsed in 2001-2002.

Since then real wages have improved dramatically in line with the unprecedented sustained economic recovery that began in 2003. As a result, manufacturing real wages in particular are at their highest level since at least 1996, more than doubling their previous real value during the short neoliberal boom.

By the same token, since 2003 the living-wage gap vis-àvis equivalent real wages in the U.S. has decreased dramatically as well and, as could be expected, it is much smaller than comparable manufacturing wage gaps among its counterparts in Brazil and Mexico, the largest economies in the region.

Nonetheless, from TLWNSI’s (The Living Wages North and South Initiative) living-wage perspective, before Argentina’s real wages in the manufacturing sector can be considered of a living-wage kind, they still have considerable ground to cover to reach the levels of Western Europe and East Asian wages. Yet, if Argentina is able to sustain the current trend, it will cross the livingwage threshold in less than a decade at a gradual pace and will attain comparable wages –in living-wage terms– to those of Western European and East Asian countries. A realistic goal indeed.

Since the 1980s, research on employment conditions in post-secondary insti- tutions has focused on the growth of contingent academic workers, or what the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has labelled “non- full-time instructors” (Field, Jones, Stephenson, & Khoyetsyan, 2014). Very little attention, however, has been paid to administrative, physical plant, and other operational staff employed within universities and colleges. Using data from a study of University of Regina students and employees, academic and support staff, this paper confronts the broader conditions of labour around the ivory tower. Employment at a post-secondary institution is analyzed through the lens of living wage research advanced by the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives (CCPA) (Ivanova & Klein, 2015). The study reframes the notion of a living wage in a post-secondary institution to include work-life balance, job security, and the realities of dignity and respect in the university workplace.

Regarding the real value of the manufacturing wages, India’s living-wage gap is not as dramatically dire as that of China. However, as could be expected, it is still one of the worst in the world, for it clearly exhibits its sheer modern slave work nature. As a result, India’s increasingly deregulated economy is rapidly becoming a very important source of misery wage manufacturing workers for the Darwinian capitalist system of today’s global corporations and their institutional investors. Whereas there is increasing talk about China reaching a turning point when its pool of surplus labour would start declining, India is expected to contribute, over the next few decades, a larger labour supply to its manufacturing sector than China. Yet, to be sure, this will continue to occur at rather meagre real wages. Consequently, along with China, India will continue to exert tremendous downward pressure on the wages of all the developing nations that have bet their economic strategy on the traditional centre-periphery relationship, anchored on the offering of comparative advantages. In this way, as Álvaro de Regil, the author of this analysis argues, from the perspective of real democracy and human rights, this poses a rather intractable problem for the labour endowments of workers worldwide, but all the more so for those in the periphery of the world’s Darwinian capitalist system in which we have been undemocratically immersed.

To write about the underlying causes of immigration means addressing a paramount social issue that pervades the lives of most societies in the world, both in the periphery as well as in the metropolises of the global capitalist system. Immigration is inherent to human nature. Billions of people have travelled from their birthplace in search of a better life from the very moment homo “sapiens” began to wander around his primeval surroundings. At first, all humans were nomads. They constantly moved from one place to another, from cave to cave, from valley to valley, from region to region, from continent to continent, many times traveling thousands of kilometres in their quest for better conditions of survival. Thousands of years later, with the rise of civilisations and hundreds of sedentary settlements, people continued to move to lands inhabited by other civilisations, with different cultural and ethnical backgrounds, always in pursuit of a better life. As empires rose and destroyed competing civilisations, many people were forced to leave, or they were moved forcefully to other places to serve the interests of the conquerors as they pleased. The history of humanity is composed of the never-ending destruction and conquering of many peoples by stronger societies in their quest for power and wealth.

This has never changed despite thousands of years of human experience and “sophistication” in the organisation of societies, despite the rise of so called democratic nation states, human rights covenants and international law. Today, people continue to move from one place to another, many times escaping a high risk of death as a result of social conflicts, poverty, or, instead of the rule of law, a complete state of anomie —the loss of all the ethical social standards conceived to procure a dignified and harmonious coexistence among the members of society. In the vast majority of cases, as should be evident, there is also the effect —to a lesser or greater degree— of the actions of foreign actors that intervene in the lives of other societies in pursuit of their own vested interests, always associated with the pursuit of greater power and wealth. In the twenty-first century, we continue the same ancient patterns of power exertion and displacement of people all over the world. In this way, millions of people continue to migrate from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, from Africa to Europe, from Asia to North America and from Iberian America to North America as well, to name the major migration flows.

This paper focuses on the underlying causes of immigration from Mexico to the United States from a political and socio-economic viewpoint. However, the root causes behind the flows of emigrants in other regions of the world are consistently the same. They result from the impact of powerful geo- political interests on the general population of both the emitting and the receiving countries of the millions of migrants in their escape from unbearable conditions and in pursuit of a dignified life. From this perspective, we will uncover and review the underlying causes of immigration from Mexico to the US, which are structural, in an effort to shed light onto their real solution. That is, the only way to permanently solve the issue of Mexican migration to the US, is by addressing the structural causes that force people to leave their homelands. Addressing only the symptoms triggered by these causes will never solve the issue and instead would further consolidate the patterns regardless of how aggressive and inhumane the policies are designed to stop the flows of migrants. We also focus on Mexico because it has been for many decades the main source of immigrants to the US due to its proximity and even more so after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which has made Mexico the third largest US trading partner, after China and Canada, beyond being the main exporter of migrants forced to leave their communities.

This paper on covers two issues, discussed as part of an earlier brief on CSR, which The Jus Semper Global Alliance considers worth insisting on due to the fundamental weight that they carry on the future of CSR. In this way, the author begins with the issue of the current reporting of the impact of corporate activity on a voluntary basis and with great latitude in its application. Then, the author insists on exposing the total absence of the element of a living wage in CSR standards, despite the fact that not paying a living wage constitutes a rational decision of business entities to exploit their workers, which is tantamount to a predatory practice. A situation that not only should be enough for civil society to not grant good corporate citizenship to any company practicing it, but that also constitutes a violation of a basic human right: the right to live a dignified life.

MEXICO AND LIVING WAGES: THE UTMOST EPITOMIZATION OF SOCIAL DARWINISM AS A SYSTEMIC PUBLIC POLICY

The policies undemocratically imposed by the governments entrenched in power for the past thirty years provide irrefutable testimony of their deliberate transformation of Mexican workers into labour-bondage disposable items.

This assessment arrives at a paramount conclusion: there is a deliberate policy in place to pauperise Mexico’s work force, to serve as a source of the most competitive labour cost possible in the neoliberal globalised division of labour. Such conclusion is the result of assessing the quality of Mexico’s manufacturing wages, gauging the trend they have followed from 1975 to 2009 for production-line workers and from 1996 to 2009 for all people employed in the manufacturing sector.

Additionally, this work makes two projections exploring two different scenarios to close the huge wage gap of Mexican production workers with the wages of equivalent workers in the U.S. The first projection will assess what kind of real wage average annual increase it would take to close the wage gap with equivalent U.S. wages in the term of thirty years. The second projection assesses how long it would take to close the same wage gap by following Brazil’s concept of annually increasing nominal wages by the sum of inflation plus GDP growth. Both projections are fully in line with TLWNSI’s concept of equal pay for equal work of equal value through gradual wage equalisation.

Yet, currently the questions posed by these projections are undoubtedly rhetorical questions. Indeed, closing the gap to make Mexican wages of a living wage kind will remain an absolutely impossible endeavour as long as Mexican society does not get the resolve to organise to peacefully remove from power the structures that have historically been working to maintain the centre-periphery relationship that keeps all the benefits from economic activity for the robber barons and their foreign neoliberal tutors. Or, as the citizenry worldwide is increasingly denouncing, as long as the 1% keeps taking most of what belongs to the 99%.

CONCLUSIONS

• The campaign promise on wages was not fulfilled. The real wage increase was substantially smaller than what was offered during the electoral campaign.

• There is no political will to make a minimum wage recovering policy a firm commitment by passing specific legislation for that end.

• The general wage increase benefits only one-sixth of salaried people for it was strictly limited to the general minimum wage, relegating the 59 minimum wage rates for professional activities to an increase to offset CPI inflation, the same wage contention policy of the last 36 years.

• It would be a great mistake to eliminate minimum wage rates for the 59 professional activities; activities require greater physical and intellectual capacities and skills than those required for activities of the general minimum wage. Assigning the same compensation criteria to professional activities would not only be greatly unfair and further depress their purchasing power and quality of life, but they would have a profound and negative multiplying effect in many other activities that require greater capacities in the upper echelons of skilled work, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which receives the highest labour compensations.

• López Obrador decanted on his commitment to recover real wages and returned to the neoliberal dogma, for he returned to conditioning any increase of wages to a concurrent increase in productivity. This sets a very ominous precedent that can only be construed as a decantation of his view on the need to address the fact that wages have lost 75% of their purchasing power as a result of a deliberate policy of wage pauperisation.

• López Obrador has established a strong partnership with the historic predators of real wages. The strong personal partnership of López Obrador with the business oligarchy, his old nemesis, can only be construed as an alliance to support the very group that has fervently worked with previous governments to deliberately pauperise wages for the last thirty-six years.

• From the global economy perspective, manufacturing wages will remain at their lowest level in the manufacturing sector, because if professional minimum wages remain losing value, higher skilled wages in the manufacturing sector, integrated with the global economy, will remain at the same level they have been since the 1990s after they were deliberately pauperised to become the main driver of foreign investment with NAFTA.

• Unless there is radical change, Mexico will lose manufacturing share under the new NAFTA. This is a particularly important issue, in light of the new NAFTA 2.0, which incorporated an agreement to increase the North American content.

• The above notwithstanding, López Obrador still has ninety-five percent of his term to amend his policies and attempt to truly transform the country by replacing the structures of exploitation and depredation with a radical new paradigm in pursuit of the welfare of people and the planet and NOT the market. We remain in hope.

The new GRI's "G3 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines" fails, once again, to address the critical issue of living wages and relies on the same old multilateral norms that condone the corporate practice of paying misery wages in most countries in the South, despite the fact that a living wage has long been declared a human right. There is an implicit missing link in the world's pursuit of true sustainability.

The GRI claims to be the result of a permanent interaction with many people that supposedly represents a wide variety of stakeholders relative to the impact of the activity of business around the world. Yet, these groups appear to represent only those who are "practitioners" of the GRI framework and not of the entire spectrum that would represent all sectors of global civil society as a whole. The fact is that living wages continue to be absent, as a reporting indicator, from the GRI framework.

In this way, the absence of the critical issue of a living wage leads to the conclusion that there is a consistency in the avoidance of this issue by the process followed by the GRI multi-stakeholder working groups, at least since 2002, supposedly created to continuously improve its reporting guidelines. In a globalised economy, we have endured the globalisation of labour markets, prices and consumers but not of labour endowments. The benefits have been privatised, but the costs have been socialized. Nonetheless, the grim and unavoidable reality is that there cannot be sustainability without social justice. Yet, living wages is an element that has been systematically excluded by multilateral organisations, governments and the so-called multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as the GRI. To the credit of the GRI, our perception is that they are, by far, the organisation most open to engaging all sectors of global civil society and somehow listen to their views. Yet, the GRI too, has ignored our call to review the Guidelines addressing the issue of wages and labour compensations. Thus, the GRI framework continues suffering from the missing link in true sustainability: the reporting by corporations of whether their labour endowments provide workers with a living wage or with exploitative wages of servitude, as is the rule-of-thumb for corporations active in the South.

This paper also discusses other G3 limitations of major concern, namely, the continued extreme flexibility in the use of the guidelines in a global context of voluntary reporting relative to how the activity of business affects economic, social and environmental sustainability.

A research paper assessing the wage structure in Pakistan with respect to real wage, minimum wage and living wage, under different occupational groups and industries. Study done under a gender lens and specifically focusing on females in elementary occupations.
Data taken from Labour Force Survey 2014-15.

This study is motivated by the concern and frustration for the lack of meaningful progress in the struggle to establish a normative framework to protect human rights (HR) along the entire domain of business activity.

The author, Álvaro de Regil, Executive Director of TJSGA, approaches this critical issue with the conviction that we endure an era in which, to say the least, a savage and perverse market ethos has been imposed upon humanity and the planet as a paradigm of life, with rules and structures designed in direct line with the conditions demanded by business for its exclusive benefit.As a consequence, societies' human rights are systematically stamped on by business activity in the name of free marketeering. In this context, The Jus Semper Global Alliance (TJSGA) has closely followed the development of the debate, beginning with the publication in 2003 of the draft of the Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with regards to Human Rights. In those days we expressed our restrained support of such Norms. To be sure, despite their broad ambiguity, such Norms constitute a first positive step upon which to build, with the direct participation of global civil society, a true regulating framework that effectively protects HR from the impact of business activity.

Taking into account that, by now, different sectors of civil society and the business world -including the work of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights- have conveyed their positions, regarding both the Norms as well as the work of the UN on the matter, through Mr. John Ruggie -Special Representative on HR of the UN Secretary General- and the UN Global Compact, it was better to wait to obtain a comprehensive vision instead of assessing these activities individually as they were taking place.

In this way, this is an assessment of the debate on the responsibilities of business regarding human rights in particular, but also generally on the political, civil, economic, cultural and labour rights; an assessment that, furthermore, constitutes the position of our only initiative: The Living Wages North and South Initiative (TLWNSI), relative to business and HR. Hence, the assessment ends by proposing a new HR paradigm with respect to business, from TLWNSI'S perspective, with true democracy and real sustainability as its underpinnings.

Prior to embarking on the assessment, nonetheless, the author clearly establishes the context of the world's stage, from the economic, democratic, true sustainability and the current state of HR in business perspectives, from which he performs his assessment.

This is how, from the very title, de Regil reveals his conviction that, in the struggle for establishing a framework regulating the responsibilities of business in respecting HR in their environs, there is a dominant position rejecting regulating the impact of business on the enjoyment of HR through a binding framework, with no other argument but the primacy of business over people and planet. In his perception, it is more than evident the clear reluctance of the UN member governments to comply with their most basic responsibility: to enhance the current HR framework, in a world globalised by the owners of the market, and guarantee the protection of the current rights.

De Regil contends that the governments of the world and their multilateral agencies have clearly imposed, in a completely undemocratic fashion, an ethos where the market reigns supreme over people and planet. Consequently, they not only condone but enthusiastically support the systematic and customary violation of HR in business, with the payment of misery wages, vis-à-vis living wages, standing out prominently in what today constitutes a modern-day-slavery business practice; the shining feature of this era's Darwinian business culture.

Accordingly, despite the overwhelming evidence of the systematic and customary violation of HR by business, what is clearly observed is an unrelenting litany of postures and gesticulations that pretend to change to remain the same, in line with the will of the owners of the market.

Nevertheless, de Regil asserts that the last word has not been said, and that we, civil society, the common citizens of both rich and poor countries, are not letting up nor will we weaken our vigour and pace to completely and radically change the current ethos.

President Lula’s Brazilian government, approaching the end of its second term, has just made a decision that is both transcendental and historical due to its paramount effectiveness in the reduction of poverty in a very meaningful manner and in the span of little more than a decade. Beginning in 2010 the Brazilian State intends to increase the real minimum wage annually, until 2023, following the simple rule of increasing nominal wages by applying the rate of inflation plus the GPD growth recorded two years earlier. Without a doubt, such policy will gradually transform Brazilian wages into living wages. In this way, Brazil commits to closing the wage gap prevailing between current Brazilian labour endowments, still undignified, and the living wage ethos prevailing in developed economies, within the current market context. This commitment makes the Brazilian State achieve a great deal of congruence with the most primeval raison d'être of any State that takes pride in being a democracy: the pursuit of the welfare of every rank of society, and especially of the dispossessed.

The Brazilian plan brings a great dose of encouragement for Jus Semper’s mission, for it exhibits rather strong affinity with our concept: The Living Wages North and South Initiative (TLWNSI); an initiative designed to close the wage gap between so-called developed and developing economies, through the gradual increase of real wages, by increasing nominal wages several percentage points above inflation. Our ebullience is unprecedented for TLWNSI has always argued that, unfortunately, the vast majority of so-called democratic governments have become market agents of the world’s capitalist system. Consequently, their performance typically favours institutional investors and their corporations. A second alternative to close the wage gap is the pressure of consumer power on businesses; an option until now unsuccessful, however, for the development of a responsible consumer culture is still in its infancy. Therefore, if by chance a State commits itself to closing the wage gap in its society, as is the case in Brazil, the setting could not be better to fulfil a fundamental human right in the context of real democracy, with the full power of the State: the right to a just and favourable remuneration ensuring the worker and his/her family an existence worthy of human dignity, as stipulated in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In this manner, Jus Semper obtains conclusive evidence, and hardly surpassable, that provides a powerful argument to assert, convincingly, that the realisation of this human right is perfectly possible through the gradual closing of the wage gap, as proposed by TLWNSI, when a country counts with the resolute political will of the State.

The first part discusses both its current infant state as a key factor in social justice and as a strategic element in corporate business best practice. The second part presents our own CSR concept.

While there is diversity in emphasis and specialisation in the development and management of CSR by GCS, the timidity indemanding that the impact of corporate activity generates equitable benefits for all stakeholders is very evident. Often enough, the mission in the promotion of CSR appears to be more the offering of a vehicle for companies to be perceived positively, without true congruence with the intended principles of social responsibility, instead of demanding an equitable and sustainable tridimensional impact. The voluntary approach to CSR, the latitude enjoyed by corporations in its application, the lack of homogenous standards and processes, and, especially, the clear avoidance of living wages –the fundamental element of social justice and a key factor in the achievement of

This article brings together two existing government programs, the federal minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which we believe play instrumental roles in addressing income disparities and poverty and achieving a "living wage" in the United States. Both government programs use employment as a key condition for getting these benefits. We believe that linking work requirement to government's income support is an important feature, which encourages employment, including at lower income and skill levels while supports adequate income through government programs. These programs are particularly important in the services sector where workers are paid below the minimum wage (the so-called tipping wage). This study breaks the analysis of the living wage into two intertwined components. The first component for achieving the living wage is to increase the federal minimum wage in accordance with a simple rule of thumb, corresponding to one-third of median earnings, which is discussed in Kovanen (2022). In the fourth quarter of 2021, the proposed level was $9.85 per hour. The second component involves expanding the fully refundable EITC for individuals with no dependents, which would be linked to the federal minimum wage level and appropriate level of the living wage, defined as one-half of median earnings. Linking the federal minimum wage and fully refundable EITC to median earnings would make it easier to adjust them on a regular and transparent basis.

"Companies must give a living wage to workers everywhere if they are to merit the “CSR” label.

After decades of evolution, CSR remains a useless societal instrument to make business responsible for the impact of its economic activity on its sphere of influence."

NEW EDITION OF TLWNSI'S WORKING DRAFT!

The idea of The Living Wages North and South Initiative (TLWNSI)It was conceived to address a very conspicuous question: why do workers in Southern countries, who work for global corporations, earn a miserable wage by any standard, whilst their counterparts in Northern countries earn a living wage for doing the same job, of equivalent market value, for the same corporation?

Our work drew a first certainty: the wages paid to workers in the South have nothing to do with the cost of living differentials between economies; rather, they have to do with the logic of comparative advantages that puts supply and demand arguments to work on behalf of a global market system that practices labour exploitation as a core strategic asset of its global operations model.

Nevertheless, contrary to what we envisioned, when the first decade of the current century came to an end, we saw an ever more entrenched fixation with supply-side neoliberal economics both among governments and markets, and a much less than expected opposition from the part of people, both as citizens and consumers, despite their substantial and exponentially growing dissatisfaction. This despite the dramatic and evident systemic crises of the current undemocratically imposed market-driven ethos.

This has moved us to redefine our focus and variables. That is, our living wage concept and argumentation to support it remains exactly the same, but our strategy and tactics have been redesigned to have a full bearing on the marketocratic ethos in which we are living. We go about this through an approach that address the logic of the market in such a way that –in sync with a wide global movement of civil society organisations– we can realistically expect to gradually transition from the current market-driven paradigm into the new true-democracy paradigm in the term of thirty years or about one generation.

This TLWNSI Issue Commentary clearly exhibits the absolute impossibility of sustaining the current North-South system of exploitation, of quasi-slavery in which the South's role is, essentially, to supply labour at a cost that perpetuates it in servitude and to surrender its natural resources to the global corporations of the institutional investors. It also shows us how, despite the official rhetoric that states that the decent work concept has led to the international consensus that productive employment and decent work are key elements to achieving poverty reduction, everything remains the same.

In January 2008 Álvaro de Regil published a study that included a detailed evaluation of Mr. John Ruggie’s work, as part of a comprehensive assessment of the debate on the responsibilities of business regarding human rights. In this new work, he continues the same approach by assessing the vision and arguments that Mr. Ruggie –UN's Special Representative for Business and Human Rights– advances in his new paper: Protect, Respect and Remedy: a Framework for Business and Human Rights.

The author's conclusion is that Ruggie’s vision in the current report continues to be in open conflict with the basic concept of democracy and of true long-term sustainability, for he continues to uphold the market as the principle that reigns supreme over the lives of societies across the world; never mind the customary, massive, ubiquitous and systemic violation of a wide range of human rights that the market exerts over billions of people every second of our time.

In his report, Mr. Ruggie deems the governance gaps –created by market globalisation– between the markets’ footprint on human rights and society’s capacity to manage it, as the root cause of the increasing abuse of human rights, and regards bridging these gaps as our fundamental challenge.

The author's assessment is in stark disagreement. In his opinion, it is absolutely futile for Mr. Ruggie to address the customary violation of human rights in the business ethos if he does not address the true root of the problem: true democracy has been supplanted by marketocracy and, thus, has disabled the States ability to impose a regulatory framework that effectively protects human rights from corporate malfeasance. The lack of regulation –a fundamental irresponsibility of any truly democratic government– is the current standard in almost every area of business activity. To be sure, the clearest and most pervasive case is the greatest debacle of capitalist economies that we are attesting to, as a direct consequence of the economic deregulation that governments have undemocratically imposed upon societies across the world since the 1970s.

Consequently, relative to human rights, de Regil contends that, as long as we do not demand from our governments a universal and legally-binding framework to protect human rights from business’ predatory practices –as a core element of international law– we will remain “in a sea of rhetoric rights, deception and posturing”. De Regil contends that unless we force our governments to fulfil our demands they will continue relying on the good old formula of pretending that they are making changes so that, at the end, everything remains the same. Something that, by the way, it is likely to occur in all areas of business, particularly in financial markets, unless society gets directly and permanently involved in the public matter, which is a fact of life in today's societies.