‘Right to work’ should be a common voice – an alternative approach to eradicate ‘poverty’

The slogan of ‘right to work’ and the ‘poverty eradication’ is not a local or a national agenda of discussion today. The observation of the International Labour Organization is that, the global unemployment rate increased to 6.0 per cent in 2008 from 5.7 per cent in 2007, while the total number of unemployed increased by 10.7 million, reaching about 190 million in 2008. The unskilled workers especially youth and women are losing their jobs and suffer from horror of income less. Also, workers are already shifting out of dynamic export-oriented sectors and are either becoming unemployed or moving to lower-productivity activities that include moving back from urban to rural areas. In this situation, it is observed that, the children, especially girls, are expected to suffer major health and education setbacks as a result of the crisis. The shrinking family budget to maintain minimum standard of living forcing the families to stop children’s education, compromise with nutrition and social needs and the education and nutrition very much sensitive for girls than boys. In this regard, the eradication of poverty is a moral and ethical imperative - so rooted, in the principles governing the United Nations. A social life free of poverty and hunger - is one of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25 (1) of the Declaration states that, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services”. This right is further reaffirmed in the International Convention of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. These human rights instruments acknowledge that human rights are derived from the inherent dignity of the human person. Extreme poverty has also been addressed by the General Assembly as a “violation of human rights”. Moreover, in the Charter of the United Nations it was determined that one mission of the United Nations would be to promote “higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development” through international cooperation (Articles 55 and 56). Keeping in mind, present scholars tried to make a bridge between the two – poverty as well as work crisis through a sociological point of view. The present situation of work crisis arising out of unskilled workforce as well as the lack of work opportunity will be discussed thoroughly. In the other part, it will be tried to address the problem of absolute poverty that is reflected in terms of deprivation in the field of right to a descent standard of living encompassing food, health, clothing, housing and necessary social services, with the help of an applied research based model designed to generate scope for self employment with reference of an ‘Alternative Approach to Eradicate Poverty’.