Corporations and Human Rights Law: The Emerging Consensus and its Effects on Women's Employment Rights

This paper analyzes the garment industry as illustrative of a governance gap that is created in today's globalized economy when corporations directly impact human dignity but states do not have the ability to extend their legislation to protect international human rights from corporate harm. The author argues that the relevant soft law instruments have largely overlooked women's employment experiences in the effort to fill this governance gap. However, there are axes of convergence between the soft law initiatives that are helpful in forecasting the evolution of a normative framework that would adequately protect women's rights. Two axes are addressed in detail in this article: the ILO core labour standards and a growing awareness of the need to draw upon the human rights paradigm in its entirety, rather than by reference to select groups of rights.