Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will address scholars, labor activists and workers’ center organizers at the second annual conference of the Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN) at Georgetown University on June 12. Wilkerson is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, a magnificent rendition of the great migration of some 6 million black Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North and West.

Members of Congress got an earful today about the dangerous and often life-threatening conditions workers face at oil refineries and in other oil processing facilities. At a briefing sponsored by the United Steelworkers (USW), Kim Nibarger, a USW health and safety specialist, laid out the issue in stark terms:

When things go bad in a refinery, they go really bad and people die.