"The Great Escape": Saket Soni on Forced Immigrant Labor Used to Clean Up Climate Disasters in U.S.

As extreme weather disasters intensify, the workers who are hired by corporations to clean up after hurricanes, floods, blizzards and wildfires are increasingly on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

For Labor Day 2023, we are rebroadcasting an interview with author and organizer Saket Soni. His book, The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, focuses on hundreds of Indian workers who were brought to the United States with false promises and subjected to grueling working conditions at a shipyard in Mississippi. When one of those workers called Soni in 2006 for help, it set off an extraordinary chain of events that led to their escape from the work camp and eventually focused national attention on the plight of the workers. As disasters have grown, this workforce has grown. And these workers do all this without legal protections, without legal status," says Soni, the director of Resilience Force, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant workers who help rebuild communities after climate disasters.