This Saturday, Oct. 5, a broad and diverse coalition of immigrant, faith, labor, civil rights and family groups will march and rally in more than 80 actions across the nation and call on Congress to pass immigration reform with a road map to citizenship that promotes family unity and protects workers’ rights.

Take the pledge to hit the streets Oct. 5. 

Immigrant construction workers in Austin, Texas, have a fierce advocate fighting for back pay, safety on the job and basic workplace rights. 

The Workers Defense Project, profiled by Steven Greenhouse in this weekend's New York Times Business section, is an example of a worker center that is highly successful in its campaigns. 

Read the rest of The Workers Defense Project, a Union in Spirit. 

This past Tuesday, I had the opportunity to participate in a half-day workshop on immigration reform, sponsored by the AFL-CIO and the Economic Policy Institute. Held at the AFL-CIO's headquarters in Washington, D.C., the focus of the session was on why a road map to citizenship for America's undocumented residents is an essential component of reform, a topic that is increasingly relevant as certain House Republicans argue for creating a legalization process that would exclude citizenship as the ultimate endpoint.

Mahoma Lopez and his mostly immigrant co-workers at the Hot & Crusty Bakery on 63rd St. and Second Ave. in Manhattan have a collective bargaining agreement that includes wage standards, vacations, sick  days and more. But organizing their independent union and winning that contract was a struggle as a new “Op-Doc” video on The New York Times website shows.

Workers at Sunny Day Car Wash in the Bronx, N.Y., who joined the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) last year, ratified a three-year contract this week. The pact mirrors the contract the workers made with another carwash in Queens less than two weeks ago.

Temporary foreign workers, from teachers to agriculture workers to au pairs, typically pay recruiting fees to individuals or agencies retained by U.S. employers seeking foreign labor. These fees can range from $500 to well over $10,000, even for temporary jobs that pay little. That means these workers arrive in the United States deeply in debt because they must borrow money, often at high interest rates.

As commonsense immigration reform moves through the U.S. Senate, people and groups on the losing side of the debate are making outrageous claims in bogus studies and TV commercials. Let’s take a minute and revisit some of the facts about immigration reform.

Workers at a Queens, N.Y., carwash are the first “carwasheros” east of Los Angeles to win a collective bargaining agreement. The new contract, announced Tuesday by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), is a part of the union movement’s continuing effort to bring workplace justice to low-wage immigrant workers.

I can’t remember how old I was before I knew my father was undocumented. By the time I was 5 or 6, my father’s long and arduous journey from Michoacán, Mexico, to our small American town of Redwood City, Calif., had already become part of our family lore. I heard how hard and exhausting it was for him, as a young boy and then a teen, to have to work every day picking cotton, strawberries and grapes in 100-degree heat. His stories captured my imagination when I considered how hard he worked and how far he had come to make a better life for himself.

Gregory Cendana, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), warns that the national debate around creating a commonsense immigration process “has largely ignored a disturbing trend in businesses: the modern-day indentured servitude of temporary workers.”