by
Daisy Pitkin
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Reina’s youngest son always wanted to wear your bracelets and would run into the backyard to avoid having to return them to you when it was time for us to leave. Lupe’s daughter liked to sit on my lap while she went in to stir whatever was on the stove for dinner. Analía’s son let me help him with his third-grade homework, which was in English, which he was just beginning to speak. We made stops that were natural extensions of these relationships, but which, at the time, seemed unrelated to the union fight: We went to a neighbor’s house to translate notes that had come home with kids from school. We went to a grandparent’s house to call immigration lawyers. We went to a cousin’s house to help complete unemployment forms or file for workers’ compensation for an injury at another workplace in a different industry.
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 sometimes let undocumented women stay for a night or two, but she did not want to go. You put together a list of the women who had this kind of trouble plus some of the members of our organizing committee—the ones who could drive and the ones who lived near the houses with the violent men. We made copies of the list, and you passed them around during our visits, telling people to call through the list—day or night—if they were afraid. One night, Analía did call, and three women showed up at her house with baseball bats. You called me that night, and I rushed from the motel to pick you up at your house, but by the time we arrived at Analía’s, her boyfriend was gone.
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 a story or a detail more intimate than what you had expected. An acknowledgment that a rare and precious thing had been released, and that you were watching it travel the distance between the people who were present and then fill the space of the room or yard or wherever we were.
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 if she wanted to talk to a lawyer or file an OSHA complaint or to see if she just needed help doing the dishes. She peeked through the front door, which she had opened only wide enough for us to see a sliver of her face. You greeted her warmly and asked if we could come inside, but she shook her head no. We heard her voice for the first time: I’m sorry, but I need my job.
When we got back to the car, you were undone with outrage, slamming your palm on the dash with every other word. Her boss ripped the skin off her hand, and she won’t open the fucking door, you said. Bearing witness to this woman’s fear made you angry. We aren’t dogs, you said. I am not a mule, you said. Do they like being treated like mules? How are they not more fucking angry?
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, and Aramark, all three of which make their money by providing services to other corporations and government agencies and schools. The services they provide range from laundry, as in the case of your factory, to food service, security, groundskeeping, waste management, and so on. The campaign was built on the theory that, working together, the unions could apply enough pressure on the three companies to win card-check neutrality agreements, like the one we had executed at Top Shelf, but on a mass scale—agreements that could cover tens of thousands of workers across the country. The campaign would be an enormous undertaking, including marches and rallies and protests and class-action lawsuits, all happening in concert across the United States and Canada, as well as in France and the United Kingdom, where two of the companies were headquartered.
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 linen—by hand—before it is sanitized.
Before it is cleaned rather than after, as is the practice in industrial laundries in other parts of the world—because “clean sort,” as the other practice is called, is harder on the machines, causes them to wear down faster, so companies have to replace them more frequently. In this country, it is the bodies of workers that take on the risk and wear, physically buffering the machines from damage and shielding the company from added expense.
Moreover, she was willing to talk about the method as a method. You and Alma clearly have a strong bond, she said. She trusts you. Which, she went on to explain, is the only purpose of the questionnaire, or “pink sheet,” as HERE’s system of gaining these personal stories from workers and then recording and sharing them among staff is called. The question set that apparently helps to evoke the stories had at one point been printed on pink paper. The sheets were no longer pink—at least not the ones I saw—but the questions and the method remained the same.
In theory, the pink sheet is a process for building bonds with workers, for gaining their trust in a way that is teachable and reproducible, so that organizers can be trained how to do it. She said that she imagined that I had gained your trust by sharing with you things about my life and then listening while you confided in me in return. That’s all it is, she said, and then described with great solemnity that HERE, under the guidance of its director, has figured out how to train organizers to identify and tell their most important and compelling personal story so that workers will open up to them and share their own most important personal stories. We record them in a database, she said, so that we remember them, and, yes, so we can share them with each other, so that when a campaign gets hard, we know what motivates each worker, and we can push them through their fear.
urgh
That same March, in 2011, one of Clara Lemlich Shavelson’s daughters was in New York, attending a commemoration of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire and a ceremony in which thirty women were receiving awards named after her mother. At these events, she kept getting approached by people offering their condolences for the tragic way her mother had died—in the Triangle fire, they said—which was confusing to her since her mother did not work at the Triangle factory and, in fact, had lived a very long time. She died in her sleep in 1982 at ninety-six at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles, where she had recently helped the staff form a union.
lmao
In 2020, industrial laundry workers made $10.13 an hour on average, while the CEO of the largest laundry corporation in the United States made $9,778,369. This is a typical disparity in today’s economy, in which more is owned by fewer people than at any point in US history, and in which unions have collapsed: union density has fallen to 6.4 percent in the private sector, around 11 percent overall, similar to the percentage it was in 1900, when the ILGWU was formed. These numbers form a telling equation. Since union density fell below 25 percent in 1977, income inequality has risen exponentially every year. In fact, the only years in our entire history in which the share of income held by the top 10 percent declined are years when union density was above 27 percent, from 1942 to 1973.
I’ve come to think of solidarity, this mixture of hope and care, as a physical force or maybe a force field, and as such it invisibly acts on all things that are passing through it at all times. It’s the space between bodies that are marching or singing or striking or otherwise taking action together. Maybe you’ve felt it, at a protest or on a picket line. I’ve heard people say that it feels like church. It’s the way bodies, our bodies, working collectively, change the properties of the space between them. It’s the most important thing.