by
Daisy Pitkin
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After the decision was made to strike at Cooper Union in 1909, after the workers gathered there raised their hands and recited the oath, a delegation of fifteen women (along with a man, appointed to lead them) ran to nearby halls to report the decision to the thousands of workers who had overflowed from the main meeting. In these halls, too, the strike was unanimously approved. In the morning, they went in to work at shirtwaist factories across the city. They sat at their machines and waited for the walkout to begin. At one factory, a sixteen-year-old worker named Rose Perr later reported that the women sat silently for what seemed a long time, that the room was alive with some kind of energy, but that no one moved until somehow they were all on their feet at once, without any one of them having taken the lead.
Manuel and Dario and the director told stories about fucked-up campaigns they had worked on across the country—bosses buying off workers, and calling Immigration to deport workers, and hiring people to stalk and beat up workers. They told stories of the scrappy antics of organizers, who, under the make-or-break urgency of factory strikes, stole truck keys and threw them into sewage grates or funneled sugar into gas tanks or smeared cement paste into the padlocks of factory gates in the middle of the night. I remember thinking that I understood the function of this all-night swapping of stories, that it was driven by the righteous indignation and pride that sustained people through the insanity of the job of union organizing—and at the same time worked to replenish it. It was a way to take control of what our stories mean. And as I sat on the motel bed listening, my own anger became more immediate and available, and it covered over the shame and sadness I had felt before. Looking back, I wonder if the exercise worked on the others in this way as well, if being able to center anger, to uncomplicate our relationship to the fight or at least uncomplicate our responses to it, comes with practice, like hope, and if practicing was what we were doing together in that room.
Inside the factory that afternoon, the managers shut down production and held a pizza party. For the first time in the factory’s twenty-plus-year history, all of the workers on each shift were allowed in the lunchroom at the same time. La Sandra had decorated with balloons and streamers and wall signs that read THANK YOU FOR VOTING NO! and NO TO UNIONS, and WE ARE UNITED (NOT UNITE). She stood in front of the workers and interpreted for El Mero Mero, who thanked the workers for their loyalty to the company and said that the company had acquired several new hospital contracts and that there would be increased production flowing through the factory, and that workers would have to work hard and cooperatively to achieve the level of production output that would be required, and that if anyone there didn’t want to work hard or if anyone there was unsatisfied with how the vote had gone, they knew where the door was and they should leave right now.
lol
Our work together was more targeted than the swath of home visits I was doing with the other committee members—we needed to fill gaps in the record Paul was assembling. We had Antonia’s statement about her warning, but needed to talk to Reina, who was working near Antonia on that day, so she could testify about what Antonia told her when she got back to her iron machine. We had Pollo’s statement about La Sandra saying that the factory would close if the workers unionized, but we needed Alberto, who was in the same meeting, to corroborate Pollo’s story. According to Paul, the trial would hinge on this kind of corroborative testimony. But Reina and Alberto and others who had seen and heard the company break the law—Guillermo and Lupe and Santos—were afraid, and so the conversations we were having with them were longer and more difficult than any we’d had before. At first, the visits ended with I don’t know, or Let me think about it, or I still support the union, but my family needs this money, to which you would say, Your family deserves more money than we are making, and so does mine.
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.