Human Rights Declaration, Article 23 on work

Article twenty-three covers work, free choice of employment, and fair remuneration. The clause on equal pay for equal work reached this text in 1948. That was decades before most countries wrote it into law. The declaration has thirty articles and runs to fewer than two thousand words.

Where this text comes fromThe article is built as three numbered clauses, and each one opens with the same word, Everyone, so the guarantee is restated from scratch three times instead of being carried forward by pronouns. The same opening runs through the whole declaration: twenty-one of its thirty articles begin with Everyone. The three clauses are not the same length: the first two run to a line or two, while the third, at thirty-three words, is nearly as long as the first two combined and is the only one that explains what the pay is for. A fourth clause, on trade unions, follows in the declaration itself, so the passage you copy stops one clause short of the end of the article.

What you might not noticeThe clause on remuneration does not stop at fairness. It requires pay that ensures an existence worthy of human dignity, supplemented if necessary by other means of social protection, which is a far stronger claim than equal pay alone. Source

What it trainsThe pattern to drill here is digit, full stop, space: each of the three clause numbers is set that way, while the article number stands between two spaces with no stop at all. Five digits in 456 characters, none of them inside a word. Three sentences of very different lengths, twenty-three, thirteen, and thirty-three words, plus seven commas, are the only breaks you get. Not one capital letter falls inside a sentence. The longest word is discrimination, fourteen letters, and it is the kind of word people type from memory and get wrong in the middle.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource