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First, I would like to offer my thanks to Lance Compa, Richard McIntyre, and Gay Seidman for their thoughtful responses to my essay. One could not find three more accomplished scholars with whom to engage in this discussion. Each in their own way has sharpened our thinking about the relationship of labor rights to human rights—Compa through a lifetime of inspiring organizing and writing, Seidman through her eloquent defense of human rights-based labor activism, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism, and McIntyre through his sharp interrogation of this activism in Are Worker Rights Human Rights? Not only do they bring well-honed critiques to bear in discussing my argument, they are generous and fair-minded. I'm grateful to them for prodding me to clarify my thinking.

In the August 8, 2008, edition of the Wall Street Journal, an editorial denounced the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), organized labor's most recent effort to reform US labor law, as a measure that would lead to worker intimidation and the end of free and fair workplace representation elections. That the nation's leading business journal carried an editorial outlining the familiar EFCA opponent's trope of worker intimidation by unions was not surprising. That the author's identity was former South Dakota senator George McGovern—that aging icon of American liberalism and a self-described “longtime friend of labor unions”—foreshadowed the uphill battle and ultimate defeat labor and its allies would face in enacting the measure.

During the early months of 1919, the term “Reconstruction,” of concern to few but historians and the friends and foes of D.W. Griffith in the years immediately preceding the Great War, was again on the lips of Americans. Alabama State Federation of Labor President, William L. Harrison, noted that “Since the signing of the Armistice, and the cessation of hostilities, the questions of reconstruction and re-adjustment are being diligently studied by the people generally.” Out of the war, he argued, came “new and progressive ideas on reconstruction.” He was right. As the war ended, dozens of books and articles bearing titles likeReconstructing America, Democracy and Reconstruction, and Social Reconstructionjoined a new journal calledReconstruction: A Herald of the New Time.This literature celebrated the role that a strong federal government had played in helping workers secure the right to join unions during the war, and it laid out hopeful plans for what the government might do to solve the “labor question” after the war. Such ideas helped convince Harrison's counterpart, Florida State Federation of Labor President John H. Mackey, that the postwar era would bring “a silver ray which carries with it wondrous tidings for the uplift of the masses.”