Ana and Dario had been building lists, too, and had enough information to blitz their respective targets at CleanCo and ACE. The director called organizers from around the country—over a dozen of them—and told them to get flights to Phoenix for the last weekend in April, about two weeks away. We wanted to launch sooner, now that we were ready—every day we waited was a risk—but that was the quickest we could get enough people into town to do five hundred house visits in two days, which is what it would take for us to talk to the workers at all three factories before the companies would start to hit back.

The two weeks proved to be too long at ACE, where managers discovered that we had been talking to one of our contacts there. They shut down production one day and called the workers to a meeting. I don’t know what happened during the meeting because no one from the factory would talk to us afterward, but the boss marched workers out of the plant and onto the sidewalk in front of it, where the company had hung a nylon banner on the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the property: NOW HIRING ALL POSITIONS, it read in English and in Spanish.

Dario was parked across the street. He saw this procession, saw that the company sent workers home early that day to punctuate their message. None of the workers he’d been talking to called him back that day. None would open their doors. So by that evening, the director decided to scrap the campaign there, to focus the blitz on Sodexho and CleanCo. (As of July 2021, ACE was still the largest nonunion laundry in Phoenix.)