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.)