We’re in the midst of a new era of momentum and militancy around labor organizing. We’re seeing headline grabbing organizing campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon shifting the political landscape. But beyond Starbucks and Amazon, union organizing has been spreading to sectors across the country.
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In our latest episode, we talk with labor organizer and writer Daisy Pitkin about her new book “On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union.” We talk about her work organizing a series of factory laundromats in Phoenix, AZ in the early 2000s. Pitkin worked with immigrant women working in the terrible conditions to organize a union. Most notably, she worked with a woman named Alma, who Pitkin describes as “the gutsiest worker leader I’ve ever met.”
This was all done despite a vicious corporate backlash in the reddest of red states.
Currently, Pitkin is organizing Starbucks workers in the Rust Belt. We discuss the Starbucks campaign and the future of labor organizing.
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. She is the author of On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union, out now via Algonquin Books.
