Human rights and their violation are an insistent focus of many activists and organizations. But are there important limitations to rights-based politics? Because an individualist interpretation of rights holds sway, Richard McIntyre asserts that the rights revolution has failed to advance the collective strength of US workers. (Encore presentation.)

Human rights and their violation are an insistent focus of many activists and organizations. But are there important limitations to rights-based politics? Because an individualist interpretation of rights holds sway, Richard McIntyre asserts that the rights revolution has failed to advance the collective strength of US workers.

Dark and forbidding: it's a phrase that describes the lives of miners, who often toil for unconscionably low wages in one of the most dangerous industries in the world. Miners and the social and political forces that fuel deadly mining practices have attracted the attention of the poet and labor activist Mark Nowak. He talks as well about trade union movements and transnational conversations among working people.

It's a time of crisis -- for capitalism, for workers as a whole, and for some pivotal trade unions. Labor journalist Steve Early discusses the state of unorganized and organized labor, the stillbirth of the Employee Free Choice Act, and tries to shed some light on the battles raging between SEIU and the National Union of Healthcare Workers and UNITE-HERE.

Why is the San Francisco Bay Area such a hotbed of radical poster making? And why, nonetheless, do outspoken and brilliant artists of the left like Doug Minkler encounter censorship in various guises here? The radical printmaker has been both celebrated and gagged. One of his posters may have even inspired someone to burn down an army recruitment center in the 1970s. He discusses the politics of art.

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, "there is no there there." Scholar Chris Rhomberg would beg to differ; he's written a history of social movements in the East Bay metropolis that encompasses the rise of the Klan in the 1920s, the Oakland general strike of 1946, and the explosion of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. (Encore presentation.)