The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America
by Saket Soni
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23:46
Saket Soni speaks with Democracy Now + photos of forced labor
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Feb, 2023
Spoiler:
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a company called Signal International recruited around 500 workers from North India, with the false promise of green cards, to repair oil rigs off the gulf coast of Mississippi. The men were kept in a heavily-guarded work camp under atrocious conditions; someone from the camp anonymously called the author, who was a labor organizer at the time, and exposed the squalid conditions, lies and mistreatment. Another man helped Soni engineer “the great escape” that is at the center of the book.
55:40
Author in conversation with moderator at Politics and Prose
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32
Jan, 2023
Spoiler:
The author tells the story of helping a group of 500 men from India escape from a situation of human trafficking by the company Signal International. He details the horrific conditions under which they lived in a heavily-guarded labor camp, where they were kept 24 men to a room. The author says he didn’t intend to put himself in the book, but that he soon realized that readers need “a tour guide” and that he had to put himself in the story, as he had been in real life.
1:05
Author explains how to solve U.S. labor shortage
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Jan, 2023
Spoiler:
Saket Soni says that migrant workers must be treated with dignity and given the same payment as U.S. workers, otherwise they will undercut the local labor pool. In addition, fair treatment ensures that the next generation of American wealth is not built on the backs of near-captives. If there are people or institutions in the economy who want to benefit from captive labor, the rest of us cannot let them push us into being part of a corrupt system. “That’s not who we are,” says Soni.
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