Worker rights as human rights: regenerative reconception or rhetorical refuge?

An effort has been mounted to recast the legal analysis of labor problems in the discourse of human rights. The United States has been at a remove from this effort; the discourse of human rights has scant purchase. This essay surveys the vernacular of labor law argumentation in the United States from the Guilded Age to the present. Using the example of "captive audience" speech, the essay argues that there may be some room for the parsimonious adoption of human rights thought so long as the analysis is at pains to define the right narrowly and restrict itself to the core meaning of the right invoked.