The Great Escape: An Organizing Thriller
The most essential organizing fundamentals jump off the pages of "The Great Escape," not as a checklist or explainer, but through one of the greatest organizing stories ever told.
If you organize long enough you will step into stories worthy of the silver screen. David and Goliath battles that might not see the light of day, unless an organizer stepped on scene. Still, few of us will find ourselves in a situation as breathtaking as the one Saket Soni does when he and his team organize the escape of hundreds of Indian guest workers from a labor camp in rural Mississippi.
Saket is a long-time organizer and the director of Resilience Force. His new book, The Great Escape: The True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, reads like a thriller. In the first few pages you are captivated by characters that pull at your heartstrings, in a predicament that boils the blood. It is the story of capitalism and race, without ever using the words. One that takes us into the culture of India and America, and brings to life the galvanizing power of food, and maybe especially, tea.
The book, just released, is all of these things, and more. But I am an organizer, and The Great Escape is the most page-turning book about organizing I have ever read. In it there are a dozen scenes that are absolutely iconic organizing situations, moments that seasoned organizers will recognize and budding ones will strive for.
The workers have been recruited to the United States by the company Signal to work as welders and pipefitters, constructing and maintaining oil rigs in the Gulf Coast. They’ve been told, under false pretense, that if they cough up $20,000, which most had to borrow, they would get work in the US, and most importantly receive “green cards,” the golden ticket to moving their family to America and in reach of the American Dream. Soon after arriving at a Mississippi labor camp it begins to become clear the living conditions are untenable, and the green cards are not forthcoming. They’ve been had. Enter the organizer. Saket meets them in this impossible situation, and they start to organize.
Here are just a few moments from the book, where the fundamentals of organizing jump off the page, not through an organizing manual, but a story.
One fundamental I believe is essential is to start organizing around immediate, meaningful things, and use those smaller wins as stepping stones to the bigger fights. Saket illustrates this in the story of Jacob Joseph.
The thing the workers most wanted was for the company to deliver on their promise of green cards. But that is not where the fight starts. Soon after arriving at the labor camp, Jacob Joseph Kadakadapally, a pipefitter from Kerala, India can’t stomach the fact that there is no tea. For someone from India, it is incomprehensible that this essential staple is not provided. While every worker was angry about this situation, it’s Jacob Joseph who begins to kick up dust, agitating the work camp staff at every single turn. He needles and presses, unwavering in his push. Management decides that holding out is not worth enduring Jacob Joseph’s daily barrage of complaints. They give in, and provide tea. A natural leader has emerged.
In organizing, winning begets winning. With the demand for tea now in hand, Jacob Joseph moves to food. The food he and his fellow workers are being served is cold rice, often still frozen. The men defrost their rice not on a stove, but by sucking on it. Again, Jacob Joseph creates tension, raising the issue at every turn, and pressing the work camp staff until they install microwaves. The workers are winning, and with the first two victories in hand, they push for an Indian cook, to be chosen by the workers themselves. It takes time, but the company relents. These three smaller, but meaningful wins in the workers daily lives build the collective-confidence of the group, and sets the stage for the jaw-dropping acts of courage that follow.
All the while, Saket is holding secret meetings with workers at a church near the work camp. He is seeding the idea of not only individual leaders, but collective organizing, and that brand of organizing is what began to take root. The company can sense trouble brewing, and while they knew nothing of Saket’s involvement, they felt sure Jacob Joseph had to be an instigator. They decided the best move, is to deport him.
A group of guards detain Jacob Joseph, place him in a work camp office, with plans to put him on a plane back to India later that day. He is about to be out of a job, lose the $20,000 he paid for the job and a green card, and be sent home in disgrace to face his family. The guard who will deport him steps outside, and Jacob Joseph grabs the phone and calls Saket’s cell. Amazingly, he picks up. In a matter of seconds Saket walks Jacob Joseph though a lightning-quick power-analysis. They agree that if he is put on that plane he will never be coming back to America, and never get his green card or his money back.
With Jacob Joseph locked in the office, the guards go to collect their captive’s belongings from his sleeping-trailer. For Jacob Joseph, it seems the end is near. But from inside the locked office, speaking in Malayalam, so the company officials can’t understand, Jacob Joseph directs a strike, on the spot. His fellow Indian workers surround the office and start chanting. The company security is at a loss: they have not faced this level of civil disobedience, and have no marching orders from management on how to respond. By the time they quell the strike, hours later, the plane that was to have taken Jacob Joseph back to India has left. The organized workers have bought Jacob Joseph time, and he lives to fight another day.
Another organizing fundamental is building members’ ownership of the work. That plays out when Saket recruits his next leader. Jacob Joseph has survived, but has been expelled from the camp. Saket needs another leader, someone inside with courage and clarity. Sitting across from Rajan Pazhambadakode, Saket senses he has just met that worker. Rajan has been attending Saket’s organizing meetings, but sitting in the back, taking stock of Saket. As they converse, it is easy to see that Rajan is intrigued, but not yet convinced by the plan to organize. He’s testing Saket. They begin kicking around strategy, with Saket listening as much as talking. As they rethink and refine the original idea, and Rajan’s thoughts show up in the new and improved one, he offhandedly refers to the emerging plan as “our campaign.” The meaning of this is not lost on Saket.
The most essential thing we do in organizing is get people to do things they had not imagined until we came into their lives. The next level is for people to own those things because they are becoming theirs. It is something we strive for everyday in our organizing. That transition just happened for Rajan.
Months later, after hundreds of workers have made the unthinkable decision to escape from the labor camp, and march to Washington DC, Saket senses he may be losing Rajan, who has become an indispensable leader. Their campaign had hit some bumps in the road, big ones. Rajan, who is questioning the whole plan, says to Saket, “We’re not the same. You could pass as American. I never will.” Saket is at a choice point in how to proceed. He decides it is time to share parts of his story he has shared with no one. His journey to America, his experience of being undocumented, and his experience of choosing organizing over love. Saket was very vulnerable with Rajan, and shared something of himself and his story that more deeply connected the two. Rajan now understood his organizer in a new light, and the relationship carried forward on stronger ground because of this moment.
There’s an important lesson here. In organizing we share things about ourselves in early one on one meetings with potential members. It’s part of how we build relationships, but we don’t share the greatest trials and traumas of our life in that first one on one conversation. Chances are the other person is not ready to hear ours, let alone tell you theirs. Moreover, when we do share it all, we don’t have much left in our pocket, not at the level of vulnerability, anyway. Organizing is a long road, and we grow intimacy with the people we organize through time served, the experiences we share, and layers of unfolding or unwrapping who we are, when the time is right.
These stories are just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve not even discussed what it takes to help hundreds of workers escape from a labor camp, what they did next, or how the story ends. You’ll have to read the book for yourself, which I highly recommend.
The Great Escape is perfectly timed. Organizers across the country are fighting to breathe new life into the craft. The most essential organizing fundamentals jump off the pages of The Great Escape, not as a checklist or explainer, but through one of the greatest stories you will ever read about organizing. Get a copy and join the conversation. It is oxygen for the organizer and fire for an organizing revival.
Andrew Willis Garcés has been doing a series of interviews on great organizing campaigns. Here’s his interview with Tara Raghuveer of People’s Action and KC Tenants.
How would you reconcile the role of the non-indigenous organizer with Maurice Mitchell’s critique of informal leadership?
Great story George! Thx for sharing. Curiously, many lay people are gifted organizers, many times more qualified than the learned ones, so-called pros. Organizing is about human basics. By the way, I published an organizing tale, based on my Chicago years. But I principally focus on Alinsky, Trapp (I also mentioned you and your meaningful newsletters) and especially German FOCO and its efforts to introduce community organizing to Germany. An important point is that the trade throughout history has always prospered from transatlantic impulses: input from both sides, US-America and Europe/Germany => https://www.maecenata.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/OP-171_final_mit_urn.pdf. My best wishes for prosperous 2023, Wolfgang