The director picked me up from my house at 10 p.m., the standard time for nightly meetings among UNITE organizers, though I did not yet know it. We went to a bar on Fourth Avenue to drink beer and talk about UNITE, about the ambitious industry-wide laundry campaign they wanted to run in Arizona as a test to see if it was possible to organize low-wage immigrant workers, most of whom were women, many of whom were undocumented, in a deep-red state. We both laughed a little and shook our heads at how fucking hard it would be, how much of a war, but then she told me more about the industry, about the conditions in commercial laundry factories; the way managers remove or disable machine safeguards in order to run production faster, the number of workers who get injured and sick and killed. By the start of the second beer, I already had a fire in my gut.

Two days later, someone from the New York office did call. He told me to pick up a rental car at the Tucson airport and drive the three hundred miles across the state of Arizona to Lake Havasu City. Now, he said. Right now. A laundry there had caught fire, and the workers had walked out. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the factory.

When I got there six or so hours later, three other organizers had already arrived, from Phoenix and California. The factory was still smoking. An iron had caught fire, which happens regularly in industrial laundries, where machinery is often poorly maintained. The manager told the workers to keep working—to continue operating washers and presses and folding machines, even as the smoke grew thick around them. He stood between them and the door when they tried to leave, but one of the workers dipped below his outstretched arm and made it to the door, and the other workers, nearly one hundred of them, followed her. When they got outside, one of the workers said she had a cousin who worked in a union laundry in Las Vegas. She walked the few blocks home, called her cousin to get the union’s number, then she called UNITE through its 1-800 hotline.

You worked in soil sort, you said. I asked if you would describe your work—I still had no idea what “soil sort” was, or what you were required to do with your body there for ten hours a day. You rose from your chair to demonstrate, maybe because you could tell by how poorly I’d asked the question that I didn’t speak much Spanish, and maybe because laundry work is difficult to explain without miming the motions of the massive machines that fill the factory. When you stood up, I was surprised by how tall you are, which I hadn’t noticed when you greeted us at your door.

You showed us how huge bags of linen—up to three hundred pounds, you said—are pushed off the backs of trucks in rolling carts. The carts are pushed into a “dumper” machine, which, like a garbage truck, picks them up with metal arms and turns them over in the air. You reached up to show us how the linen is supposed to fall on the soil belt. A person is stationed there who is also called a dumper. On your shift, that person is Santiago, you said. You bent forward to show how he tugs open the bags of soiled hospital laundry with his thinly gloved hands. You showed how he pulls each bag’s mass of sheets and gowns and towels apart. You said, The company doesn’t replace the gloves every day, so we have to rinse and reuse the ones they give us. Sometimes the gloves break open, and we have to keep using them anyway. You said this in Spanish after turning to me and saying, Sorry, no English in English, and I, in return, waved my hands, awkwardly, I imagine, and said, No, don’t worry! in English, which Manuel then had to interpret.

We talked about the “blitz,” which was key to our model of organizing. As groundwork we needed to build a list of all your coworkers: their names and shifts and departments and phone numbers and, most importantly, home addresses, Manuel explained. We would build a map of when they worked and where they lived, and then many organizers from UNITE’s staff and workers from union laundries in California and Las Vegas and Chicago and New York, who had been trained in this kind of organizing, would come to Phoenix, and we would visit everyone—all 220 or so of your coworkers—over the course of a single weekend. That was our best shot, because even though your factory operated 24/7, most of the supervisors and the main manager and the HR representative were away from the factory from Friday evening until Monday morning. And though they would certainly get word of our organizing from the first house calls on Friday evening—because someone would call their supervisor, out of fear or to curry favor, and the supervisor would call the general manager, who would call the corporate contact he and the other managers of Sodexho’s more than thirteen thousand worksites had been trained to call at the first whiff of a union—they might not be able to react in a concerted way during that slim stretch of time. In this way, your coworkers could decide whether or not they wanted to form a union in a space, however momentary, that was free from the company’s intimidation.

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.