“Riveting and intimate. It is hard to imagine a more humanizing portrait of the American labor movement. A remarkable debut.” — Francisco Cantú, New York Times bestselling author of The Line Becomes a River. On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona. Workers here wash hospital, hotel, and restaurant linens and face harsh conditions: routine exposure to biohazardous waste, injuries from surgical tools left in hospital sheets, and burns from overheated machinery. Broken U.S. labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back. The drive to unionize is led by two women...
Publisher: Algonquin Books; First Edition (March 29, 2022) Pages: 288 pages ISBN-10: 1643750712 ISBN-13: 978-1643750712 ASIN: B09JS37WR1
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Daisy Pitkin has spent over twenty years as a community and union organizer, working first in support of garment workers around the world, and then rising through the ranks at UNITE and then UNITE HERE to become an Organizing Director, and eventually leading all new organizing in the union’s Laundry Division. Her essays have been awarded the Montana Prize, the Disquiet Literary Prize, the New Millennium Award, and the Monique Wittig writer’s fellowship and earned nominations for the Krause Essay Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and an honorable mention in Best American Essays 2013. She grew up in rural Ohio and today lives and writes in Pittsburgh, PA, where she has returned to organizing with an offshoot of UNITE.