On the Line (A Line Cook Romance)

The main story in the book is a five-year campaign that I helped to lead among industrial laundry workers in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 2000s where I worked for kind of a small, scrappy organizing union unite, an offshoot of the international ladies' garment workers union.

It is the kind of groundswell that I didn't know that I would see in my lifetime as a union organizer.

It's one of the most incredible campaigns I can imagine and part of what's incredible about it is that workers are it's really an organically worker led campaign.

I think our challenge as organizers at this point is to do what we can to help facilitate that organic growth and momentum right and not try to contain it in any way to allow it to just sort of burn across the country as the kind of wildfire that it is.

The book is On the Line, a story of class solidarity and two women's epic fight to build a union by Daisy Pitkin.

The main story in the book is a five-year campaign that I helped to lead among industrial laundry workers in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 2000s where I worked for kind of a small, scrappy organizing union unite, an offshoot of the international ladies' garment workers union.

And we underwent an experiment in Phoenix which was at the time a deep red city in a deep red state to see if we could organize mostly immigrant workers in these industrial laundry factories that are in every city across the country but kind of go unnoticed or they're largely invisible.

And it took us five years to get to majority union density in those factories and it's the story of what it took and really of one of the main worker leaders there, Alma who's one of the gutsyest worker leaders I've ever met who really organized her factory and the others around her across Phoenix.

I think you know we open the segment by talking about a lot of the kind of brown swell of organizing that we're seeing now. Amazon workers are organizing Starbucks workers miraculously are standing up and organizing inside that multi-billion dollar corporation despite fierce union busting.

I hope that the book will find its way to readers who might not normally pick up a book about labor and it will give some context for those headlines that people are seeing on a daily basis. They'll understand not only why workers are organizing but why it's so difficult to organize and what it is that they're up against.

The main story in the book, though as you said it has multiple parts, but the main story in the book is a five-year campaign that I helped to lead among industrial laundry workers in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 2000s where I worked for kind of a small, scrappy organizing union unite, an offshoot of the international ladies' garment workers union.

The main lesson is that labor law in this country is broken. It makes it very difficult to organize unions even when a strong majority of workers in a workplace want to have a union.

Workers who work in industrial laundries actually they sort and cleanse and iron and pack tens of thousands of pounds of linens from hospitals and also from restaurants and hotels every day.

I hope that the book will find its way to readers who might not normally pick up a book about labor and it will give some context for those headlines that people are seeing on a daily basis. They'll understand not only why workers are organizing but why it's so difficult to organize and what it is that they're up against.

I think we're at a turning point and I say that you know I know that there's a risk of just sort of sounding overly optimistic but I really am optimistic the Starbucks workers campaign in particular it is the kind of groundswell that I didn't know that I would see in my lifetime as a union organizer.