黛西皮特金的书”:一个类的故事, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union” is a strange hybrid: part memoir, part history of American unions, part passionate call to action. It’s also poetic, stirring and odd (we’ll get to the moths later).
In the early 2000s, a young Pitkin, a college-educated white woman from a working-class Ohio background, was sent to Phoenix by the Unite union to help organize the workers (mostly Latinas) in the industrial laundries there. In addition to long hours, poverty wages and mechanical dangers, the workers on the “soil sort” line sometimes found “syringes and scalpels, sometimes body parts wrapped in the linens.” They were daily exposed to all manner of human excretions and forced to rinse and reuse the flimsy rubber gloves the company, Sodexo, provided. It was grueling work managed by a company that preyed on poor, undereducated, immigrant labor.
Early in the organizing, Pitkin meets Alma Gomez García, a soil sort worker eager to help organize a union. The rest of the book is addressed, like an elegiac letter, to Gomez García, a middle-aged Mexican woman who eventually becomes something of a labor “rock star” and Pitkin’s dear friend and organizing partner. Together they refer to themselves as “las Polillas,” the Moths.
The moths. Pitkin is admittedly a bit obsessed with them. It starts with her dreams, in which “Every cell of [my] skin is carpeted with moths. Every inch gray-white-brown. Scaly. Dusty. Fluttering.” This all before Arizona experiences an “extraordinarily large flight of miller moths,” the kind of infestation that forces you off the road because your windshield is opaque with their remains, during their first year of organizing.
Alternating chapters in “On the Line” are called either “Las Polillas” or “Fires,” and in them we get not only the grueling story of trying to unionize Alma’s laundry, but also the history and mythology of moths and a study of women in labor movements from the silkworm strikes in Lyon, France, in the 1830s (moth-related) to the shirtwaist strike, known as the Uprising of the 20,000, in 1909 New York to modern-day struggles in farmwork, textiles and laundries.
While Pitkin does sometimes succumb to an inside-baseball approach to labor history (the acronyms alone are dizzying), the narrative is strong enough to pull the reader through the legal rigamarole and union infighting and into a more nuanced exploration of what solidarity truly means, why some people are driven to fight for what’s right, and what it means for a white woman of relative means to “organize” working-class women of color.
In the end, Pitkin entwines these various threads into a heartfelt and persuasive argument for organized labor now more than ever. The epitaph in her book is from author and organizer Jane McAlevey and reads, “Unions are such a pain in the ass, really. Anyone who has dealt with a union understands. … But unions, Americans may finally be coming to realize, are absolutely essential to democracy.” This could be the elevator pitch for “On the Line.”
On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union
By Daisy Pitkin
(Algonquin Books; 288 pages; $27.95)