1940s drafters of the UDHR saw social rights as a working-class victory

Evidence

In stark contrast, in the late 1940s, delegates charged with drafting an international bill of rights depicted social and economic rights as evidence of the social progress won by workers’ movements. Rights to work, leisure, social security and a ‘decent standard of living’, as the Ecuadorian delegate put it, were the ‘real triumph of the twentieth century’. China’s P. C. Chang warned that neglecting ‘freedom from want’ would produce a document that would ‘ill accord with the times’. Chile’s Hernán Santa Cruz, a tireless advocate of social and economic rights, argued for adjusting production and distribution to secure general welfare, in order to transform ‘the political democracy of the nineteenth century into an economic democracy’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 149

Categorization

• XREF: Directly contradicts the modern NGO framing in the preceding passage — the same document (UDHR) read two opposite ways depending on era. — connects to: Soviet delegates at the UDHR drafts rejected civilisational hierarchy language as obsolete — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 77; The Great Depression and socialist threat drove inclusion of social rights in the UDHR — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 150; Wartime union power positioned workers to demand social rights after armistice. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 217 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Wartime union power positioned workers to demand social rights after armistice. #corroborates (0.86) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 217
• Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system #corroborates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174
• Postwar social tension forced state officials to concede citizenship rights to workers #corroborates (0.82)
• The UDHR’s social and economic rights were designed to pacify, not radicalize #contradicts (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 180
• Postwar reconstructionists saw the war’s social gains as a foundation for permanent social justice #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 240