To find out more and take action, visit Interfaith Worker Justice's 2010 National Day of Action Against Wage Theft page...

Revelations of Extreme 'Slave-Like' Working Conditions and Billions in Wage Theft Drive Nationwide Protests
By Art Levine, In These Times
November 13, 2010

Activists in more than 30 cities, organized by Interfaith Worker Justice and backed by labor groups, are staging a National Day of Action Against Wage Theft on November 18. "As the crisis for working families in the economy has deepened, so too has the crisis of wage theft," says Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) Executive Director Kim Bobo, perhaps the country's leading reformer addressing the ongoing scandal.

As much as $19 billion is stolen from American workers annually in unpaid overtime and minimum wage violations and, in some cases, through the human trafficking of legal immigrant workers. The latest case to come to light involves alleged horrendous conditions for immigrant workers reportedly hoodwinked in Mexico by a food services contractor for the New York State Fair and kept in near-slavery conditions of $2 an hour.

Indeed, the scandal surfaced when some of these legal guest workers showed up several weeks ago at a Syracuse area clinic, severely dehydrated and malnourished after allegedly being kept in virtual imprisonment in a trailer at the fair and at other locations; they were reportedly being denied thousands of dollars in legal wages owed them while working about 100 hours a week at fairs for months, according to legal filings and Danny Postel, communications coordinator for Interfaith Worker Justice.

"It's one of the most shocking cases of wage theft," Postel says...

The Wall Comes Tumbling Down

Greg Kaufmann | October 18, 2010 It was an unlikely place to hear Abraham Joshua Heschel quoted, and the rabbi’s words came from an unlikely messenger.

At a news conference on a farm outside of Immokalee in southwest Florida, Jon Esformes, operating partner of the fourth-generation [1], family-owned Pacific Tomato Growers—one of the five largest growers in the nation with more than 14,000 acres in the US and Mexico—declared, “In a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

And with that he announced an agreement with the 4000-member Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to implement a penny per pound pay raise — which stands to increase workers’ annual earnings from about $10,000 to as much as $17,000 — and establish a code of conduct that includes an external complaint resolution system, shade and protective equipment in the fields, and a worker-to-worker education process on their rights under the new agreement....

Protesters clash with police over New Orleans demolitions
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Thursday December 20, 2007

Violence broke out in New Orleans on Thursday after police shut the gates of City Hall against protesters who were attempting to enter a City Council meeting that was expected to approve the demolition of 4500 units of public housing. When about 100 protesters broke through, police began using pepper spray and tasers and even engaging in fistfights with the demonstrators.

MSNBC spoke to Judith Brown-Dianis of the Advancement Project, an organizer of the demonstration, who explained that the City Council normally allows people to stand in the aisles and at the back but had arbitrarily set a strict limit on the seating capacity in order to exclude the protesters. She said the violence could have been avoided if the police had just let people in.

"What's behind this is a new vision for the city," Brown-Dianis told MSNBC. "That means fewer poor people in the city. There's a lot of money going into this.".... (video below the fold)

Petition: http://WhenTheSaints.org It's been two years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, and still there are tens of thousands of families without homes. 30,000 families are scattered across the country in FEMA apartments, 13,000 are in trailers, and hardly any of
the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt. Support
the Gulf Coast Recovery Bill of 2007 by signing the petition at
www.WhenTheSaints.org