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We had less time on the big stage, in front of the full SEIU general assembly, so you described only your department in the factory before detailing our ongoing campaign. It is called soil sort, you said, because in this country, laundry workers have to handle thousands of pounds of dirty hospital …

In May, UNITE’s international union office collaborated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest and fastest growing unions in the country, to launch a public-pressure campaign targeting what they were calling the Big 3 multiservice corporations: Sodexho, Compass, a…

Days later, we learned from another worker that Luis had removed a safety guard from the soil-sort conveyor, enabling it to move linen down the line faster. The woman’s hand had been pulled under the belt, and it tore at her skin until someone pushed the emergency stop. We went to her house to see …

So being afraid that we were going to lose was no surprise. And there was no relief in saying it out loud, except that there was someone to whom to say it. You tipped your chin up slowly and nodded once, a gesture I had seen many times during house visits when the person we were talking with shared…

That summer, we heard a lot about violent boyfriends and husbands. We sat with a new coworker, who told us through split and swollen lips that domestic violence shelters called Immigration on people without papers, so she had nowhere to go. We had heard from another worker about a church that would…