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These were not the words we used in your living room. You did not need for us to tell you that winning a union in your factory would be hard or that the system is rigged in favor of the company. People don’t work in industrial laundries unless they have to. And there is no real space or time that i…

We talked about the “blitz,” which was key to our model of organizing. As groundwork we needed to build a list of all your coworkers: their names and shifts and departments and phone numbers and, most importantly, home addresses, Manuel explained. We would build a map of when they worked and where …

You worked in soil sort, you said. I asked if you would describe your work—I still had no idea what “soil sort” was, or what you were required to do with your body there for ten hours a day. You rose from your chair to demonstrate, maybe because you could tell by how poorly I’d asked the question t…

Two days later, someone from the New York office did call. He told me to pick up a rental car at the Tucson airport and drive the three hundred miles across the state of Arizona to Lake Havasu City. Now, he said. Right now. A laundry there had caught fire, and the workers had walked out. They were …

The director picked me up from my house at 10 p.m., the standard time for nightly meetings among UNITE organizers, though I did not yet know it. We went to a bar on Fourth Avenue to drink beer and talk about UNITE, about the ambitious industry-wide laundry campaign they wanted to run in Arizona as …