Resource Wealth: A “Curse” for Labor Rights?

Though a great deal of research has examined the economic and political consequences of natural resource wealth, its implications for labor remain empirically under-examined. In this article, we contend that resource abundance undermines labor rights due to the inelastic demand for resource-intensive products, which serves to insulate these states from internal and external pressures to protect these rights. In addition to this direct linkage, we posit that resource wealth indirectly undercuts labor rights through its adverse impact on civil society and bureaucratic capacity. Examining these linkages across 148 countries for the years 1994–2010, we find that resource wealth has a negative and significant impact on labor rights practices, though not on labor rights laws. Results from a causal mediation analysis show that resource wealth also undermines labor rights through its negative impact on labor organizations and bureaucratic capacity