Forty-eight out of fifty economists now agree: the United States is in a recession. And who bears the brunt? It's you baby, American workers. Companies are already laying off people and slashing benefits for those who remain. Sounds like a job for a labor union? Indeeed....and many see the election of Barack Obama as a turning point for organized labor.

Bruce Raynor, General President of the union UNITE HERE, representing close to 1/2 million workers and over 400,000 retirees from the textile, hotel, casino, food services and industrial laundries joins us to tackle some of the questions ahead. A founding member of the Change to Win labor federation, UNITE HERE was the first union to endorse Barack Obama and deployed 500 full time workers into swing states this election.

While Barack Obama's website acknowledges that the US economy depends on millions of undocumented workers living in the shadows, the issue of immigration reform has remained there, in the shadows, glaring only in its absence from the Presidential debates and campaign coverage.

Well, there are those who have a new comprehensive, humane plan for immigration and a new method of presenting the issue to the public. The approach is to get up close and personal - talking about the experience of migration and its toll on immigrant families - with a view to encourage policy that is responsive to people’s needs, rather than political jockeying. Our guests today have brought these stories of those frequently in the shadow of mainstream media to light in a new book, The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization. Co-author, Rinku Sen, is executive director of ARC, the Applied Research Center and publisher of Colorlines magazine; her co-author and one of the heroes of the book, Fekkak Mamdouh, a restaurant worker and union activist at the Windows on the World restaurant at the World Trade Center who organized the workers after that crisis, and Mamdouh's partner, Saru Jayaraman, an attorney, activist and professor. They co-founded Restaurant Opportunities Centers United which has set out to represent the some 40% of NYC's restaurant workers who are undocumented.

Also, a report on healthcare in post-Katrina New Orleans (and a plea for HR-676 Guaranteed Healthcare) comes to us from CalNurses. Commentaries from Kate Clinton and David Sirota (who warns us off post-election brainwashing.)

Finally, five American thinkers come together in this week's GOT DOCS - people you'll be familiar with if you're a regular viewer of GRITtv - Hedges, Wolf, Klein, Conason, Kennedy. Filmmaker Joseph Sottile raises these voices, to peer into the dark corners of American democracy where the Constitution is up for grabs. These are the stories Sottile couldn't do in his 10 years at the networks. This week's doc-in-progress, "The Warning."