ONLINE: Daisy Pitkin
media release: A Room of One's Own welcomes Daisy Pitkin, author of On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union, for a conversation on Crowdcast with Progressive Magazine web editor Kassidy Tarala!
On the Line takes us inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona. The fight is led by two courageous women: Daisy Pitkin, a young labor organizer, and Alma, a second-shift immigrant worker who risks her livelihood fighting for safer working conditions. On the Line illuminates the harsh realities that workers in these factories face—routine exposure to biohazardous waste, surgical tools left in hospital sheets, and overheating machinery—as well as the ways broken US labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back. Forged in the flames of a vicious anti-union crusade and a grueling legal battle, the relationships that grow between Daisy, Alma, and the other factory workers show how a union, at its best, can reach beyond the workplace and form a solidarity so powerful that it can transcend friendship and transform communities. But when political strife divides the union, and her bond with Alma along with it, Daisy is forced to reflect on her own position of privilege and the power imbalances inherent in any top-down organizing movement. In the social tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Stephanie Land’s Maid, or Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, and capturing the deeply personal nature of organizing, On the Line offers an exhilarating and long overdue look at the modern-day labor movement, how difficult it is to bring about social change, and why we can’t afford to stop trying. At this moment, when interest in collective action is rising, On the Line is a vital contribution to our national conversation.
Daisy Pitkin has spent more than twenty years as a community and union organizer, working first in support of garment workers around the world, and then for US labor unions organizing industrial laundry workers. Her essays have been awarded the Montana Prize, the Disquiet Literary Prize, the New Millennium Award, and the Monique Wittig Writer’s Fellowship. She grew up in rural Ohio and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Today, Pitkin lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she works as an organizer with an offshoot of the union UNITE.
Kassidy Tarala is a journalist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the web editor & audience engagement coordinator of The Progressive magazine; a reporter for the Minnesota Women's Press; and a volunteer editor with Empowerment Avenue, a collective committed to the radical act of fairly paying incarcerated writers and artists for their work. Find her on Twitter @kassidy_tarala.