by
Daisy Pitkin
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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 is “free from intimidation” inside the dynamic of trying to build power to be used against your boss at a job you need in order to live. You already knew the company was going to fight. They’ll probably fire all of us, you said, with the hard crack of laugh that I was hearing for the first time and can still hear now.
When we’d finished eating, I asked if anyone had a final question or announcement, guessing someone would respond with another joke or an exaggerated call for me to just wrap it up already. For a moment, no one said anything, and then you raised your hand, Alma—a formality that brought a sudden seriousness to the room. You asked a question that stays with me still, though I don’t hear it in your voice or even in Spanish anymore—it comes as a memory of my own translation. You were wondering about the will to fight, a phrase I had used in my story about the shirtwaist strikers in 1909. Las ganas de luchar, I had said, and those were the words you used, too, when you asked. You wanted to know what drives some people to fight while others don’t, or don’t want to, or can’t. Everyone is afraid, you said. So what is it that pushes some people across the threshold of fear? Is it all rage? you wondered. Is it courage? Are the ones who fall down in their fear too afraid or just not angry enough?
I listened and nodded as one of the other trainers said something about struggles needing leaders and about it being the job of those leaders (Of you, here in this room, he said) to be courageous and to lead their coworkers through their fear. If I had tried to answer then, I think I would have said that people who fight and people who don’t aren’t very different from each other, or that the difference has less to do with anger or fear and more to do with vision—that some people can’t imagine or haven’t yet imagined what good a fight will do, can’t see a version of the world that doesn’t yet exist.
Now, having thought and thought about this question since you asked it in 2004, I wonder if the will to fight is unrelated to vision or imagination, if instead it’s a kind of metamorphosis, a state of being so ravenous for change that you are changed. The tightening skin tightens around the neck and body of the caterpillar, which is already walking around with parts of another, future body tucked inside. The you before the fight denatures you, exploding into newness out of necessity. (“He must shed that tight dry skin, or die,” writes Nabokov of a caterpillar in its final stage.)
Now, when I think about what seemed at the time a very clear understanding of unions and power, I feel mostly perplexed. Of course it is better to organize than not organize—that is not the question. But I no longer subscribe to that top-down theory, nor do I think of power as a finite sum, a thing that is acquired by wresting it away—however forcefully—from the powerful, as if the work of organizing were akin to cleaving an orange, or as if the substance of solidarity were the same as the substance of oppression. What I mean is that I no longer think that worker power originates with the boss, or that workers come by it by taking it away from the company where they work. Worker power is built and waged through an entirely separate system.
The union we built in Phoenix was a wholly original force. Its power was not stripped away from Sodexho or the other laundry companies or the managers who oversaw production. It was built, piece by piece, through the everyday tasks and exchanges that comprised our organizing. We made leaflet copies at Kinko’s. We drove in circles around the city. We packed and unpacked the folding chairs for our committee meetings. We knocked on thousands of doors. We asked people to trust us, and they did. We stood together in the parking lot, running department meetings from midnight until 4 a.m., and listened as the moths plinked their bodies against the floodlights.
I asked Pollo about the “wash alley,” the department where he worked, told him I’d never seen the kinds of machines he works on. He described the tunnel washers in the plant, using his arms to gesture. As long as a bus, he said. He described moving bags of linen from the soil-sort area to the wash department, explaining that the heavy, full bags are hooked to a system of rails overhead. The wash workers push them through the air, along the tracks, to the wash conveyor. Pollo is short, about my height, five foot three, so when he demonstrated reaching up to loosen the pull string on the bags, he rose to his tiptoes. He said, The soiled linen, still full of asquerosidad—foulness, a word I wrote down in my notebook when we got to the car and looked up later—falls onto the belt, which runs it up and into the mouth of the tunnel washer. He told us that he sometimes has to crawl into the tunnel, through hot, bleachy water that leaches the foulness from the linen, in order to clear jams. He said that the supervisors don’t cut power to the machines when he’s inside like they are supposed to. He made eye contact for the first time when he said this, angry about having to go into the tunnel in this way. He knew how dangerous it was, climbing inside the machine without following the lockout/tagout and confined-space standards required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which get skirted by some companies because they are costly in terms of time and production. I make $7.80 an hour, he said.
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.)
UNIONS ARE ESSENTIALLY working people standing together, in solidarity, to form collective power in the workplace and sometimes beyond. One root of this type of power in the United States stretches back to 1824, when in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, hundreds of girls—teenagers mostly, but some as young as seven—led what they called a “turnout,” which would become the first factory strike in US history.
The girls worked at a dam-powered cotton mill, where their bosses had met the night before and decided to cut their pay by 25 percent while simultaneously extending their thirteen- to fifteen-hour workdays by yet another hour. The day after the bosses announced these new conditions, 102 workers blocked the mill entrances at start time. They held a meeting there, just outside the factory, in front of their bosses and the rest of the town. They resolved not to go inside to work, and by the next day, their turnout had spread to the other cotton mills in town. It lasted a week, until one of the mills mysteriously caught fire, in what was perhaps the first act of industrial sabotage in this country’s long, rich history of industrial sabotage. The day after the fire, mill owners negotiated better hours and pay and safer conditions with the teenage strike leaders.
The Uprising of the 20,000 was part of a wave of strikes that blew the top off of whatever had been containing the remaining rage and militancy of workers during the Gilded Age, a time that, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, marked the greatest level of economic disparity in US history. One response to this period of great and growing labor strife was a legislative one—the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
The NLRA was created as a system to manage industrial conflict. It, through the government agency it precipitated, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), supports labor organizing through its power to compel employers to recognize unions and bargain over working conditions. The NLRB represented a significant shift in the government’s stance with regard to unions: from repression to what has been called “integrative prevention.” The legislation marked a turning point in union density, too—membership shot up, because the government was suddenly regulating and protecting workers’ rights, and the strike wave that led to its passage died down as strikes became more limited to the bread-and-butter issues of wages and benefits that arose during contract renewal fights at already union worksites.
Of course, the NLRA is not what gives workers the right to organize. Working people have the right to assemble and can withhold their labor with or without the NRLA. They had been doing so and winning since long before 1935, both in the United States and around the world. And, anyway, almost immediately after its passage, the protections that were established by the NLRA were peeled away.
In 1938, just three years after the NLRA’s passing, the Supreme Court ruled in its Mackay Radio decision that while workers could not be fired for striking, they could be permanently replaced. Under the Mackay doctrine, as it came to be called, if workers struck for economic gains like raises and improved working conditions, the employer could hire permanent replacements—scabs, as they are otherwise known—and then not have to give the workers their jobs back when the strike was over. For workers, the difference between the terms fired and permanently replaced was of little importance if both meant they were out of a job. After a short curve of learning how to wield this new crushing tool, bosses realized that, since they can hire scabs to keep production moving during a strike, there is little incentive to reach an agreement with current employees at the bargaining table.
Despite the modest protections of the NLRA and the active threat of the Mackay doctrine, workers in the mid-1940s launched another massive strike wave, which included over five million workers at public utilities and in industries like coal and steel, meatpacking, and auto manufacturing. In 1946 in Pittsburgh alone, 120,000 workers went on strike. This time, instead of passing legislation that would calm strife as it had in 1935, Congress did the opposite. In 1947, it ratified the Taft-Hartley Act, or the Labor-Management Relations Act, even over the veto of President Harry S. Truman. This vile law establishes a litany of constraints on union activity. It prohibits certain strikes and boycotts. It limits union political power by banning federal campaign contributions. It allows states to pass right-to-work laws, which were first championed by Jim Crow architects as a way to prevent the coming together of Black and white workers into the same unions.