Abstract:
This article attempts to review the challenges to labor rights caused by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and examines some of the issues in terms of the reinterpretation and expansion of labor rights in the international human rights law regime. Income inequality, deepening of job polarization, and the consequent deepening of economic inequality among individuals ultimately raise various human rights issues. Of course, it is difficult to understand how labor rights will develop in future societies. However, it is questionable whether labor rights contain and resolve all the above issues under the current international human rights law, and it is necessary to reinterpret the right to work as a fundamental right of a comprehensive character that is the foundation of the future society. When the number of jobs decreases, it may be questionable whether the state’s indirect obligation of building a better environment for job creation is sufficient in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Economic inequality and polarization can be brought about by automation and there is an ambiguous area here in which human rights violations occur. Moreover, for the existing vulnerable groups that do not acquire new technologies, there is a need to reconsider the relationship between the existing labor and education rights in that they are more likely to remain digitally illiterate because of remaining as unskilled workers or limited educational opportunities. The development of science and technology requires the reinterpretation of decent work in terms of (human) development for freedom. The same is true for developed as well as developing countries.