child labour, the freedom of association and effective exercise of collective bargaining rights and of course equality rights – can be understood as an important part of this process, but are not the whole process, which the 2008 ILO Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization recognizes must among others include social protection. And labour rights are meant to be effectively and efficiently enforced, as close to the workplace actors’ as possible, often through alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. In material terms, labour rights – including basic matters such as control over one’s own time – one’s own working time – are crucial to the move from servitude and slavery toward what labour lawyers tend to refer to as “citizenship at work”. The contemporary international focus on the notion of “decent work”, which is meant to capture much more than state law, at some level also reflects the promised outcome of labour rights AND broader societal change. Yet racialized minorities have tended not to benefit fully from the promise even of fundamental labour rights. If there is a citizenship at work, the workers have tended to fall outside of it. Take for example the freedom of association and effective exercise of the right to bargain collectively. Although collective representation through unionization can contribute significantly to the rights that workers enjoy, historically and to this day racialized minorities are underrepresented in occupations that face relatively high unionization rates (such as skilled trades in construction, some transportation occupations such as truck driving, and teaching). Conversely, racialized minorities tend to be overrepresented in occupations where unionization tends to be low such as agricultural workers, domestic workers, cleaners and janitors, taxi drivers... The data of course do not quite capture the exclusionary processes that lead to a representation gap and the failure to mobilize to respond to it. There are numerous structural factors that lead to systemic discrimination, including received ideas about racialized workers’ proper – subordinate – place in society. I would add that these understandings are not uniform across racialized groups – they interact in complex, often counter-productive ways. Some are increasingly referring to this kind of labour market segmentation as part and parcel of the broader process of racial profiling. The core of my intervention today is that for workplace rights to be effective for racialized minorities, more than abstract articulation, and more even than enforcement and compliance mechanisms such as human rights tribunals and labour rights tribunals is necessary. We need proactive bodies, attune to structural labour market inequality, that are empowered to look closely into the systemic measures that lead to inequality. This includes robust boards of inquiry that are well financed and that have real investigative authority which can be exercised at the initiative of the boards and can handle collective, systemic complaints. This also includes greater attentiveness, within these bodies, to internal representation of members of racialized minorities, and greater openness to the perspectives of those who live racial discrimination in the workplace. And in a time of under-financing of human rights bodies, the words of my Australian colleague Dianne Otto are fitting: we need “an ethical commitment to address the material aspects of human dignity” which includes approaching workplace issues from a global economic justice and substantive equality approach.