One of my first stops on my Summer travels in the South was Pascagoula MS., were I meet with members of MIRA! (The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance). MIRA! Organizer Socorro Leos was kind enough to spend a day talking with me about the struggles of workers in Pascagoula, post-Hurricane Katrina. Socorro is herself an immigrant worker who was displaced by the storm and has been struggling with city officials to allow her to continue to live in this bustling industrial city. Pascagoula was the site of a major successful strike by members of IBEW at the Northrop Grumman Shipyards this past Spring. But the port city has also become famous for producing some of the most egregious cases of the exploitation of guest workers (H2B program workers) in recent years. The numbers of guest workers in the shipyards and docks of the Gulf Coast has dramatically increased post-Katrina, and so has the level of disregard for these worker's basic human rights. A recent attempt by Indian guest work...

-- FLOC Organizer - Cástulo Benavides Rodríguez - Outside FLOC's Monterrey Office, recently renamed the Santiago Rafael Cruz Justice Center (top) and Santiago Rafael Cruz (bottom) FLOC organizer who was murdered last April. In this era of increased globalization and growing migrant labor, most unions are talking about organizing internationally. But making cross border organizing something real and concrete is a whole other story. FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee) is putting rhetoric into practice. FLOC has setup an office in Monterrey Mexico, from which they can organize, educate and reach out to farm workers in their hometowns in Mexico. Their efforts to protect guest workers from exploitative labor recruitment agencies, has earned them the respect of many Mexican migrant laborers, and the ire of those that prey on migrants. FLOC organizers believe labor recruiters were behind the brutal murder of FLOC organizer Santiago Rafael Cruz in their Monterrey office last April. I v...