A Founder’s Guide to which Labor Rights are Human Rights

What every entrepreneur needs to know:

When you start a company, you have to become multi-disciplinary fast. You learn how to structure the company, fund the product, make the product, market it, sell it, deliver it, and keep your books. It's a crash course in everything from building a website to investor-led financing terms.

But have you learned about human rights in your supply chain? Probably not. Maybe it came as a short add-on to a sustainability course that was really about carbon. Maybe your sourcing contact told you they'd vetted the factory for labor abuses and you didn't ask a follow-up question, because you didn't know which one to ask. Most founders don't encounter their responsibility for human rights conditions until it has already become a problem.

In the abstract, nobody argues with human rights. Ask any founder whether the people making their product deserve to be treated with dignity, have an ethical employer, and have their rights respected, and you'll get the obvious answer. Then ask what's on the roadmap this quarter.

That gap isn't hypocrisy; it's a function of an entrepreneurial ecosystem and narrative that values minimum viable product over all else, while claiming that consumers don't really care how a product is made anyways. Human rights read like a problem that arrives later: at scale, with a real supply chain, once there's someone whose job this is. Everything else on your list produces something urgent by Friday, and even though human rights aren't optional, sometimes it can feel like you get to choose when to worry about them, and later seems fine.

I think every founder should consider this an urgent need. Nearly everything that protects workers in a supply chain is systems work, and systems are cheap to build before you sign and expensive to retrofit after. Knowing who actually makes your product takes an afternoon when you have one supplier and turns into archaeology when you have forty. The same is true of everything built on top of that knowledge. None of it is hard at your size. It gets progressively harder to retrofit as you scale.

So this isn't about waiting to get caught. It's that you are, right now, standing in the narrow window where this is within reach without having to make big changes, and the window closes a little bit every day.

A (Brief) History Lesson:

People treat labor rights as a subcategory of human rights — a specialized application, added later, for the people who care about that sort of thing. The history runs the other way. The International Labour Organization was founded in 1919 on the premise that peace cannot hold unless it rests on social justice. It was the first permanent international institution organized around the proposition that social justice within states was a matter of international concern.

The war is what finally created the momentum for action on a global level. The ideas had been accumulating for more than a century: abolition, organized labor, women's suffrage, public outrage sparked by photographs of children at work, and preventable tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The Universal Declaration, in 1948, set out what every person is owed regardless of where they live or who governs them: life, liberty, and personal security; freedom from discrimination; the prohibition on slavery and the slave trade; rights when suspected, accused, or punished by a government; redress when rights are violated; freedoms of thought, conscience, religion, opinion, expression, assembly, and association; family rights; privacy; nationality, movement, and asylum; property; democratic participation; education; cultural rights; and labor rights. Much of the modern human-rights framework elaborates, specifies, and develops that foundation rather than replacing it.

These are the floor. Not the ceiling, not best practice, not a standard anyone has to be persuaded into — the floor.

The Universal Declaration doesn't claim to create anything — it speaks of recognizing the inherent dignity and the inalienable rights of all members of the human family, and it says people are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Born with. Not granted. The drafters took themselves to be writing down something already true. And nobody defends the alternative. States that have a forced labor problem don't argue forced labor is acceptable, they deny it is happening. Governments with children in their factories don't claim a sovereign right to it; they dispute the numbers. The norm is settled enough that the countries breaking it feel obliged to lie about it.

Every ILO member country has a duty to uphold the fundamental rights at work (like union rights, eliminating child and forced labor and discrimination, protecting worker safety), even if they didn't ratify the specific convention for one of those rights.

Then there's you. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, companies have their own responsibility to respect human rights. That responsibility exists independently of whether the state where you operate is willing or able to protect those rights, and it follows your business relationships through the supply chain. You are responsible for knowing your actual and potential human rights impacts, preventing and mitigating them, and addressing adverse impacts with which you are involved. “Our contract manufacturer handles labor” describes a delegation of work. It is not a transfer of responsibility.

Which is the whole point of calling it a floor. It doesn't move with geography and it doesn't move with corporate structure. The baseline does not disappear because the state has failed to ratify a treaty, doesn’t have adequate laws on the books, or doesn’t enforce its own laws. The geography does not erase the underlying human right.

Notes:

You won't find my headings in a treaty. International law files most of these rights under economic and social rights — the residue of Cold War-era negotiations — or gathers them under just and favorable conditions of work, children's rights, and freedom of association. If you're not already immersed in them, these phrases tell you little about the underlying rights. So I've grouped them in a way that is easier to understand, remember, and take with you.

This is education, not doctrine. It's a working map of ground most founders never get taught, not legal advice and not a compliance standard. The instruments behind each right are cited, so you can go do your own homework. I recognize that these categories aren’t perfect - for example, reasonable accommodation could fall under 5, 6, and 7.

For those who are already immersed in this, you’ll notice I cite many ILO conventions that are not fundamental. These are cited to complement other instruments that do identify those rights as human rights, and the ILO convention helps to flesh out what that means.

1. Workers have the right to join together to protect their interests.

  • The right to form trade unions. UDHR art. 23(4); ICCPR art. 22; ICESCR art. 8(1)(a); ILO Convention 87.

  • The right to join trade unions. UDHR art. 23(4); ICESCR art. 8(1)(a); ILO Convention 87.

  • The right of trade unions to promote and protect economic and social interests. ICESCR art. 8(1)(a).

  • The right of trade unions to establish national federations/confederations. ICESCR art. 8(1)(b); ILO Convention 87, art. 5.

  • The right of trade unions to form or join international trade union organizations. ICESCR art. 8(1)(b); ILO Convention 87, art. 5.

  • The right of trade unions to function freely. ICESCR art. 8(1)(c); ILO Convention 87, art. 3.

  • The right to collective bargaining. ILO Convention 98, art. 4.

  • Protection against anti-union discrimination in employment, and against employer interference in workers' organizations. ILO Convention 98, arts. 1–2; ILO Convention 135.

  • The right to strike. ICESCR art. 8(1)(d); ILO Convention 87, as interpreted in the ICJ Advisory Opinion of 21 May 2026.

2. People's free will can’t be taken away.

3. Children should never be exploited.

  • Freedom for children from employment in work harmful to their morals or health or dangerous to life or likely to hamper their normal development. ICESCR art. 10(3); Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) art. 32.

  • Freedom for children from the worst forms of child labor: trafficking, forced recruitment into armed conflict, commercial sexual exploitation, illicit activity, hazardous work. ILO Convention 182.

  • Minimum age for the employment of children. ILO Convention 138.

4. The profits of honest work should sustain a family.

  • The right to work: access to the labor market, not entitlement to a particular job. UDHR art. 23(1); ICESCR art. 6(1).

  • The right to vocational guidance and training. ICESCR art. 6(2).

  • Protection against unjustified dismissal. ICESCR art. 6, as interpreted in General Comment No. 18; ILO Convention 158, art. 4.

  • The right to fair wages and a decent living for the worker and their family. UDHR art. 23(3); ICESCR art. 7(a)(ii).

  • The right to an adequate standard of living — food, clothing, housing. UDHR art. 25; ICESCR art. 11.

  • The right to social security, including social insurance. UDHR arts. 22 and 25; ICESCR art. 9; ILO Convention 102.

  • Economic rights necessary for dignity and the free development of personality. UDHR art. 22.

  • The right to a reasonable period of leave before and after childbirth with pay or social security benefits. ICESCR art. 10(2); Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) art. 11(2)(b); ILO Convention 183.

5. Who you are shouldn't decide what your work is worth.

6. Work shouldn't destroy your body or consume your life.

7. The right to a remedy.

Bottom Line:

You don't need to become a human-rights lawyer to build a company that respects human rights. You need to know what the floor is, know where your supply chain touches it, and build the systems that keep you from falling through it. A good partner early on can make this a reliable part of your company's practice as it grows. Request a consultation.

For information only. This article is not intended to be legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is formed by reading this. When in doubt, consult counsel.