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.