Book by Daisy Pitkin Review by Beth Alvarado

On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union 

by Daisy Pitkin

Review by Beth Alvarado

ISBN: 978-1-64375-071-2

262 pp

Publication Date: March 29th, 2022

Algonquin Books

Radical Solidarity

My late husband was a house-painter in Arizona, a right to work state. If you worked in a union shop, you rarely had work; if you worked in a non-union shop, you could work seven days a week, ten hours a day, but for little pay, no security, no rights or benefits. He said we lived in a hand-to-mouth economy and yet he never joined the union because he’d never have enough work to feed our children.

Why is the fear of scarcity stronger than anger over poverty-level wages and unsafe working conditions? In On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union, Maria Alma Gomez Garcia, an immigrant worker from Mexico, asks this question of the author, Daisy Pitkin, about the will to fight: 

……………………What is it that pushes some people across the threshold of fear? 

……………………Is it all rage? Is it courage? Are the ones who fall down in their fear 

……………………too afraid or just not angry enough?

In On the Line, several short chapters ground the book in the history of women workers who have become angry enough to help form unions. Pitkin’s skill as a writer makes these shorter chapters as compelling as the central, contemporary narrative through which she weaves them. 

In one of them, she quotes Kate Alterman, a seamstress who survived the 1911 factory fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York’s garment district, where 146 workers died. Alterman testified in the trial of the owners that when the fire broke out on the 9th floor and workers found the doors locked, she and her friend Margaret tried to open them:

……………………I saw [Margaret] bending down on her knees. . . her hair was loose and the 

……………………trail of her dress was a little far from her, and then a big smoke came. . . I just

……………………knew it was Margaret, and I said Margaret, and she didn’t reply. . . I noticed 

……………………the trail of her dress and the ends of her hair begin to burn.

The owners had locked the doors because they suspected workers of stealing thread and scraps of material. Pitkin shows the prosecutor carefully scaffolding the events of the fire in order to build empathy between the jurors and workers, and yet the owners were found not guilty. A month later, they collected $60,000 as an insurance payout, $410 for each worker. In a later civil suit, they settled and paid $75 per lost life to the families of the dead, a net gain for them of $335 for each person who had either been engulfed in flames or plunged to the pavement below. 

In some ways, this book is about language: about the languages of those who profit from the work and those who do it; about the ways language is translated and mistranslated; about the ways language is often used to obfuscate and about the things that cannot be said at all. But in this chapter, the language is money, and it hits us like a hammer.

The larger contemporary story is told in chapters called “Polillas,” or Moths,  which detail Pitkin’s friendship with Gomez Garcia and their fight to build a union in Phoenix, Arizona, in the early aughts of this century. The book begins with Pitkin lying on a hospital bed in an emergency room. She is feverish and freezing cold, her teeth chattering, and as the nurses float clean and warm white blankets down on top of her, she thinks of Alma: 

……………………The near contact with you, via the rough fabric of sheets and blankets 

……………………that belonged to neither of us, was a comfort. . .

……………………The next day, at home and feverish on the couch, I started writing this 

……………………to you.

The use of second person makes Alma the center of the narrative and reveals, in its direct address, an intimacy between Daisy, the narrator, and Alma, the protagonist. It also attempts an intimacy between the reader and Alma by stitching us to her. It’s the same reason Bostwick, the prosecutor in the Triangle Fire trial, describes the factory in such detail for the jurors because, as Pitkin points out, “He was asking them to let their bodies inhabit the space where other bodies had burned.” 

Bodies are important in On the Line. The first time Pitkin meets her, Alma pantomimes what happens every day in the laundry, in all of the different jobs. Manuel, another organizer, translates as necessary. Alma stands on the line as the dirty laundry comes in, bundled in huge 300-pound bags. The sheets are often soiled with blood, puke, and feces. Scalpels, hypodermic needles, and even body parts are sometimes tangled in them. 

We follow Daisy and Alma as they become friends, as they do the shared work of creating solidarity among the workers, as they openly organize, as they go to trial against the factory. As Daisy becomes proficient in Spanish, they share stories and Alma often says, SÍ, Daisy, asÍ es. Yes, Daisy, that is how it is, a small detail that reminded me of my late husband, who was Mexican American and had the same unflinching way of facing reality. 

Daisy and Alma come to call one another “Mija,” “Amiga,” “Hermana,” or “Compa,” informal terms of endearment or at least familiarity. After Daisy tells Alma of her many dreams about moths, about moths covering her body, about becoming a moth who can’t find her wings, they begin to greet one another saying, “Polilllllla!”

Certainly, moths represent the workers, and just as certainly, they represent metamorphosis and the risk that’s necessary to bring change about. In fact, as Pitkin points out, inside the chrysalis, the moth is “digesting itself. . . turning itself to soup in order to grow wings.” There is something irreducible in the metaphor. The workers are moths, drawn to the light of change, but they are also fueled by the inner flame of anger. Either way, they risk being consumed by fire. Yet, what is the alternative? If they want to fly?

Pitkin is as unflinching as Alma. AsÍ es. And she doesn’t spare looking at herself, her own privilege, assumptions, motivations, and failings. As committed as she is, she knows that Alma and the other workers are still the ones who are putting everything on the line. 

As income disparity continues to grow, still more people will need the will to fight. But On the Line shows us that workers, alone, cannot change the hand-to-mouth economy that traps them. For that kind of systemic change to happen, we need radical solidarity. We need, as bell hooks said, “a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives.”  We need the will to change laws. We need rage, but we also need to help those who fall down in their fear. 

“Anger is powerful,” Pitkin writes, “it’s true, but care for one another is, too. And care for one another, unlike anger. . .is continually renewable—it becomes both an engine for the fight and a destination for it, elemental to the new world the fight demands.” 

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 holds an 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.

Beth Alvarado is the author of four books, most recently Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales and Anxious Attachments, which won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

10 May 2022