Little-known labor history is illuminated in union attorney’s new book

When Mark A. Torres was researching his first novel, A Stirring in the North Fork, he came across a piece of local history he’d never known about. Starting during the labor shortages of World War II, Long Island had been home to dozens of camps for several decades, some of which kept migrant workers in deplorable–and often deadly–conditions. As general counsel for the Teamsters Union Local 810, Torres was fascinated. But information about these camps was available only in news accounts, film documentaries, memoirs and local records. Years after completing A Stirring in the North Fork (plus a children’s book and a second novel) Torres decided he would write the first full-length non-fiction account of these camps and the people who lived and died in them: Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood.