Facilitated By: David Ortiz-Whittingham

Audience: Open to Everyone

Every construction site involves not just a highly complex mixture of materials and trades, but also invariably becomes the site of intersection of a host of social forces--labor, immigration, and local and national politics among them. In this session, we'll explore how the construction industry lays bare one of the core issues of racial and economic justice of our age: the degree to which American society builds its wealth and comforts upon the hyper-exploitation of immigrant workers. We'll further discuss how an organized, international labor movement can resist that exploitation, and how all of us can take part in building it, whether as workers ourselves or as taxpayers who fund construction projects in our own backyards.