Organizing a Multi-Racial, Multi-Ethnic Working Class
Saket Soni is the executive director of the National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, dedicated to organizing African American and immigrant workers for a just reconstruction of post-Katrina New Orleans. He has worked as an organizer in Chicago at the Coalition of African, Asian, European, and Latino Immigrants of Illinois, a city‐wide immigrant rights coalition, and at the Organization of the North East.
Soni co-authored “And Injustice For All: Workers’ Lives In the Reconstruction,” the most comprehensive report on race in the Reconstruction of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, and “Never Again: Lessons of the Gustav Evacuation,” an account of the treatment of African Americans in the sheltering process.
Soni has testified before Congress on racial justice and labor rights issues. He has crafted strategic campaigns with direct organizing, litigation, communications and research components to advance the human rights of guestworkers. The New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ) organizes day laborers, guestworkers and structurally unemployed workers to advance a racial and economic justice agenda and to build a movement for dignity and rights. In the current economic and political climate, that translates into work on the key issues of immigration, jobs and displacement. NOWCRJ engages in direct action, leadership development, strategic litigation and communications work to win organizing and policy victories that add breadth, depth and momentum to a social movement for racial inclusion, opportunity and equity.
This Provost’s Lecture, part of the How Class Works Conference, will be held on Thursday, June 5, at 7 pm in the Student Activities Center, Ballroom B.
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