The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a discussion of On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union with author Daisy Pitkin and a panel of labor activists.

Register here to join on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom link.

This event will also be live-streamed to ESFL’s Facebook page.

On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundries 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. The drive to unionize is led by two women: author Daisy Pitkin, a young labor organizer, who addresses this exhilarating narrative to Alma Gomez García, a second-shift immigrant worker, who risks her livelihood to join the struggle and convinces her fellow workers to take a stand.

Forged in the flames of a grueling legal battle and the company’s vicious anti-union crusade, including the retaliatory firing of Alma, the relationships that grow between Daisy, Alma, and the rest of the 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 friendship with Alma along with it, Daisy must reflect on her own position of privilege and the complicated nature of union hierarchies and top-down organizing. She looks back to uncover the forgotten roles immigrant women have played in the U.S. labor movement and points the way forward. As we experience one of the largest labor upheavals in decades, On the Line shows how difficult it is to bring about social change, and why we can’t afford to stop trying.

A graduate of Macalester College, 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 U.S. labor unions organizing industrial laundry workers before earning an MFA in Writing at the University of New Mexico. Her essays have been awarded the Montana Prize, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, the New Millennium Award, and the Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. Pitkin lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she works as an organizer with Workers’ United, and she is currently playing a leading role in the Starbucks organizing campaign.

On Monday evening, April 11, Daisy will be engaged in conversation about her just-published book by Dania Rajendra, who served as editor of both the St. Paul UNION ADVOCATE and the Minneapolis LABOR REVIEW in the early 2000s, Megan Gavin, a former staff person with the Minnesota Nurses Association, and Jackson Kerr, an organizer with Teamsters Local 320. Join us and participate in this conversation.

Free and open to all