On the Line, Daisy Pitkin
On the Line, Daisy Pitkin
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On the Line
A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union

Author: Daisy Pitkin

Narrator: Daisy Pitkin

Unabridged: 9 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/29/2022


Synopsis

“Riveting and intimate. It is hard to imagine a more humanizing portrait of the American labor movement. A remarkable debut.” 
—Francisco Cantú, New York Times bestselling author of The Line Becomes a River 

On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories 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. Broken U.S. labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back.

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.

Daisy Pitkin 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Donna on February 02, 2024

On the Line, a labor memoir by Daisy Pitkin, tells the true story of a grassroots struggle to organize a nonunion laundry in Arizona as part of an industry-wide unionizing campaign. My thanks go to NetGalley and Algonquin for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now. Daisy is an......more

Goodreads review by Simply Trisha on May 28, 2022

I really enjoyed reading this Absolutely marvelous book!! I highly recommend this book......more

Goodreads review by Vahni on July 12, 2024

Just beautifully executed. I don’t know a lot about labor history or modern union organizing so this was a great introduction, but more than that, I couldn’t read more than a couple pages without tearing up. This is as much a portrait of female friendship as it is about the pitfalls and triumphs of......more