As the rate of climate-fueled disasters intensifies, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the immigrant workers lured into forced labor by corporations who hire them to clean up after hurricanes, floods, blizzards and wildfires.
This is what longtime labor organizer Saket Soni writes about in his new book, The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America. Saket Soni is the director of Resilience Force. He first joined us in 2007 when the story was still unfolding with a man named Sabu Lal, one of hundreds of guestworkers from India protesting conditions at a shipyard they were hired to clean up in Pascagoula, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina by the company Signal International.
SABU LAL: When I stepped into my man camp that is provided in the yard of Signal International, I just surprised that, because in my 20 years of experience, I didn’t dream of such a situation, because there is 24 peoples in a room, like I think it’s a pigs in a cage.
AMY GOODMAN: The men were fired when they complained about their living and working conditions. But they didn’t stop there.
Saket Soni recently joined us from New Orleans to share more about the “great escape” he documents in his new book. I asked him to take us back to 2006, when he received a mysterious call from inside a heavily guarded work camp in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where hundreds of welders and pipefitters had been recruited from India to come to the Gulf Coast to repair oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina.
— source democracynow.org | Feb 10, 2023