On the Line: Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union (2022) by Daisy Pitkin is probably the most well-written book about the labor movement I’ve ever read. The book is an account of the author’s experience as a union organizer in the mid-2000s written as a long letter to the worker organizer she developed a close bond with, Alma. The characters are relatable, passionate, courageous, and draw you in. The author’s first-person organizing stories are interwoven with important union history to astutely draw out themes of labor struggle as true of capitalism of years past as they are today. An allegory of the moth’s desire to fly towards the light of a fire and to its own certain death illustrates the drive union organizers have to keep fighting bosses despite the self-destructive effects these fights have on their mental and social lives. If you like well-written books, you should read this book on these merits.

If you are looking for any kind of inspiration or positive model for what union organizing can be like, you should read a different book. On most pages Pitkin has a caring voice as a writer and a gentle touch as an organizer, but gentleness by itself is no protection from the machinations of personal and institutional power that subtly slice through the chapters. You almost forget how unseemly an image of union organizing this is because the storytelling is by turns electrifying, stirring, and heart-tugging. I’ll leave it to other reviewers to discuss the book’s positive aspects, and I’ll confine myself to the political message and meaning of the story for workers and organizers today.

Pitkin begins the book as a newly hired staff organizer for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) sent to organize an industrial laundry factory in Phoenix. The outline of the story is familiar to anyone who knows about the conditions of low-paid workers and their attempts to fight for a better life through collective action. The dignified workers, the low wages, the abusive bosses, the horrifyingly unsafe job conditions.

UNITE instructs their organizers to not show much emotion because doing so distracts from the workers’ experience. Organizers are instructed not to share verbally or socially anything from their personal life with the workers they spend all day every day organizing with. Organizers are instructed to stay far away from the personal lives of the workers.

“The firewall on fraternization in UNITE extended beyond how organizers were meant to relate to workers. For the most part, the organizers (at least the ones on our team) applied it almost as stringently with each other…. The aperture of our relationships was tightly focused on the task at hand.”

This is advocated by UNITE for the sake of efficiency, focus, and professionalism. Rather than building relationships between organizers and workers that are multi-faceted and able to bear the complex dynamics and emotions of whole human beings, Pitkin shows how UNITE’s methodology makes for relationships that are closed off, stilted, and stunted. Pitkin expresses unease with this mode of relating to people in organizing but seems ambivalent herself on whether it is justified.

These relationships are further strained by imbalances of power inherent in UNITE’s organizational hierarchy. The organizer is much better paid and has more authority within the union, while many workers are asked to give up much of their spare time to follow along. 

Pitkin writes “I was paid to organize you [Alma], after all, a job predicated on coercion, even if well-intentioned.” Pitkin has access to much more information and decision-making influence in the campaign and Alma mostly goes along with it in the beginning, eager to fight for a more dignified job and a better life. As the story develops the divide widens as Pitkin gradually moves up within UNITE’s leadership while Alma is mostly kept on the outside. It’s unclear if Pitkin means only paid organizing is inherently coercive, or if all organizing, paid and unpaid, is coercive, or what exactly she means. I think the methods she gets trained in and then uses are very instrumentalizing, treating workers as pawns in their own fight while the paid organizers mostly call the shots. But Pitkin leaves little room for considering, much less showing, what organizing can look like when not premised on coercion.

In addition to the imbalance in their institutional access and influence in the union, Pitkin repeatedly comments on her identity in this fight as it contrasts with the mostly lower-wage and latinx workers she’s organizing. 

“Why do this, you said, instead of some other job you could have gotten? You didn’t say “you, a white person, you, a person who went to college.” … But I understood. You were pointing directly to a sort of slipperiness, or a fissure, that had gone unaddressed …”

Pitkin recounts an episode where latinx staff at UNITE joke and place bets on how soon the new white organizer (Pitkin) is going to get promoted because the white people in the union always got the promotions over the more experienced people of color. Indeed, the racial filtering plays out through the book’s story just as the organizers of color predicted it would. But it’s unclear if Pitkin ever does more than dwell anxiously on these relations. Rather, the personal reflections themselves appear to displace a more critical assessment and forestall any attempt to renegotiate her relation to the conditions that reproduce these power imbalances in the union. 

Pitkin gives lip-service to more democratic ideas, with lines such as, “I no longer subscribe to that top-down theory” of union organizing, but she’s also repeatedly at pains to justify her own power and position. In an interview given about the book, she notes the complexity and gray areas of these dynamics before rationalizing her behavior in saying, “It’s essential that we win.” In the same interview, she suggests that it’s not the power differential itself that’s the problem but the mere concealing of unequal power relations that is objectionable. Her pensive interludes and minor self-criticisms serve to condone the overall arrangement and fend off any consideration of alternative ways of structuring unions or relating to workers. 

The book often reads like a confession, as if confessing the sins absolves the sinner and enables them to keep sinning all the same as long as they keep confessing. It may seem like I’m being overly harsh on Pitkin in describing her actions, but I’m not being more harsh than she is on herself (it gets worse). I’m just less willing to accept these melancholic confessions and frothy self-reflections as an appropriate response to inflicted harm and active participation in toxic institutions.

Depressingly, the other contemporary model of organizing portrayed in the book is even more loathsome. Pitkin documents how UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) to form UNITE HERE part way through the book. She aptly highlights the contrast between UNITE’s anti-emotional and anti-personal organizing culture with HERE’s aggressively emotional techniques. 

A particularly appalling practice of HERE’s is “pink-sheeting,” where an organizer asks someone deep and probing personal questions about their politics and their organizing. The deep personal information revealed is recorded and then brought up later by the organizer in order to pressure and shame them into going along with whatever the organizer wants. One aggressive line of questioning is described: “Why are you resisting? and Why don’t you follow his orders? and Are you committed to building the union at the hotel or not? and It doesn’t seem that you are. And Don’t you want to learn to be a leader? and What are you afraid of?” The victims of these cruel little inquisitions, which are often carried out in front of others, are frequently reduced to tears. Sometimes lower-level organizers inflict this on workers, and sometimes higher-level union organizers inflict this on the lower-level organizers. Pink-sheeting becomes a big part of the rift that emerges between the two sides in the newly coalesced UNITE HERE. Pitkin objects to HERE organizers’ use of pink-sheeting and never engages in this particular misdeed herself, but these objections appear tepid in light of what follows. 

Due to the UNITE-style grind of spending nearly every waking minute focused on organizing while on a campaign, Pitkin burns out numerous times throughout the book. She retreats to her apartment in Tucson or to a motel room in Phoenix to drink whiskey out of plastic cups, smoke cigarettes, and watch TV for days or even weeks on end until she’s recalled to work on the next union campaign. Towards the end of the book she completes her metamorphosis from an idealistic new organizer to a tyrannical manager within the union overseeing teams of staff at the height of the UNITE HERE civil war:

“… I directed [my staff] to do appalling things, which we were asked to do by the UNITE-side president in order to leverage a better and less costly divorce from HERE. We bullied our way into contract negotiations among airport food-service workers. We sabotaged a hotel organizing campaign…. I was angry. I ran the team angrily. I told the organizers to get out of Phoenix if they could not do these things. I told them if they chose to stay, they were not allowed to complain. I fired an organizer for complaining.

At the same time, I could not eat. I did not sleep. My skin was turning yellow.”

Shortly after this she crashes hard; her union supervisor orders her to go home and not return to work until she has seen a doctor and is better. Pitkin clearly isn’t endorsing or defending her more revolting behavior, but the extent of her reflection is that she just got carried away. “Most of the organizers did not want to do these things, but they did them fervently, in the belief that breaking the union apart was the only way to save it.”

There’s no deeper contemplation about how the union structures and the methods she’s been applying the whole time led her to this point. The power imbalance built into the union structure that leads to organizers directing campaigns that workers have little independent agency in is the same power imbalance that leads to union leaders fighting self-destructive civil wars for institutional control that workers themselves have little influence over. Workers themselves are either pawns or collateral damage, but never does the idea or even possibility of a worker-run union really enter the narrative. Even the spirited earlier actions she helps organize with Alma and the laundry workers are built on lopsided power relations and a culture of exhaustion and control. It all feels knit from the same yarn, with her sometimes more, sometimes less harmful episodes of organizing differing more by degrees than in kind.

Pitkin speaks union lingo throughout the book, explaining common union organizing methods which can be more or less manipulative depending on the intentions of the organizer and the institutional pressures of the unions that they belong to. I’m afraid that Pitkin’s narrative blends basic organizing principles with their more polluted manifestations in a way that many readers won’t be able to disentangle without broader contextualization. For instance, it’s not just the pink-sheeting that is twisted but also the way that the more abhorrent methods of HERE make UNITE’s far-from-savory methods look acceptable by comparison.

Pitkin seems to imply that the heroics of worker action make up for her more casual improprieties as an organizer because this is supposedly what’s needed to make a strong labor movement. In the aforementioned interview she candidly though nervously admits, “I like to control the parts of the campaigns that I work on, and by “parts” I mean all of the parts, to be honest. Because I don’t want to lose…. We can’t afford to lose.” I can only imagine many readers newer to unions coming away thinking that to serve the labor movement you have to be hardcore, you have to do bad things sometimes in order to succeed, you can have a little self-awareness but in the end you just have to buckle down and win at all costs to yourself and others.

And it’s not like the ends justify the means here. Near the end of the book, the main campaign she worked on at one of the industrial laundries wins a union contract after a years-long battle alternating between workplace organizing, legal fights in the courts, and backroom deals between national union leaders and employer executives. While the contract has some decent wins around safety and wages, Pitkin is honest about how it’s not a good contract either. Worse, worker power in the laundry mostly dissipates (becomes “weak”) as core worker organizers from the campaign quit, are fired, or are intimidated into submission by domineering bosses and the union doesn’t invest resources to rebuild or sustain any degree of worker organization on the job. 

If the workers had gotten a good contract and sustained a strong worker culture on the shop floor, maybe one could have argued that all the manipulation and coercion from the staff organizers was worth it. But that’s not the case, and the workers themselves seem to be of only temporary interest to the union, which falls off once the contract is signed (and member dues start to flow into union coffers). This campaign and contract trajectory appears to be typical: at one point this campaign is touted as the model for UNITE HERE’s national campaign to organize industrial laundries and Alma becomes the poster child.

Alma has the kind of fire and commitment that could make her a life-long union militant. Instead, she’s tossed around like so much dirty laundry, repeatedly put in subordinate positions by Pitkin before Pitkin abandons her completely and unexpectedly in the middle of a series of union campaigns at other laundries around town when Pitkin gets promoted to a regional staff position based in a different city. Up to that point they had become close in a UNITE kind of way, spending many hours a week together fighting against laundry management. Pitkin doesn’t have the heart to tell Alma about her departure in person, only calling her from the airport as she abruptly leaves to not see Alma again for many months. The friendship begins to wither as they only rarely see each other and Alma slowly stops taking Pitkin’s calls. 

Alma then becomes a staff organizer herself and gets the full HERE experience of manipulation and bullying from the union bosses. Alma ends up on the HERE side of the split, though it appears to be more for practical than political reasons. In the end, Alma leaves the union job to go back to the laundry because the union’s culture is too hard on her. She is later fired from the laundry. It seems like none of the other workers who got involved in the campaign at that factory stayed meaningfully involved for very long after the contract was won. Nothing in the story implies Alma ever gets involved in the labor movement again even though years later she and Pitkin rekindle their bond in occasional text message conversations.

And this is the larger but less visible tragedy of this style of unionism. Those most committed workers, often people of color and in lower-wage jobs, burn out (or are abused and pushed out) of the labor movement when, in the end, they just can’t take it any more. In the book and later interviews, Pitkin justifies her organizing practices with the claim that she has expertise that workers need. Alma and countless other workers acquire that expertise too, but one big reason the labor movement is dependent on staff is because so many of the workers who become expert organizers quit toxic organizing scenes and leave the movement forever. Continuously losing good people is what rots the labor movement from the inside out and prevents it from being sustainable, much less growing.

In the book’s conclusion she breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly about the virtues of unions. But here again she avoids addressing the substantive tensions she avoided as a character and narrator in the story. Beyond some placid gestures towards care in organizing (“I’ve come to think of solidarity, this mixture of hope and care, as a physical force…”), it’s really hard to tell what concrete lessons she draws from her experiences in the book.

The problems here are symptomatic of a prominent wing of the progressive labor movement that puts short-term wins over long-term sustainability, organizers over workers, contracts over grassroots agency. It’s not just this or that union technique that is despoiled, but the innumerable inadequacies, failures, and abuses described in the book provide plenty of impetus to question the whole apparatus and philosophy of this style of unionism.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Workers and organizers don’t have to tolerate or adopt patronizing or underhanded methods as a necessary cost of fighting for better working conditions. Unions can be built that both improve workers’ lives and respect workers’ agency and dignity (though such unions may infringe on the control and salaries of union bosses). The best of union history offers many alternatives for anyone willing to look for them. Those who spend time around the labor movement have a choice of models to choose from, of visions to move towards, of solidarities to live out.

After burning out the last time, Pitkin quits (or is sort of fired from) her union staff job, goes to grad school to get an MFA, works as a university writing instructor for a while, writes this book, and then gets a job again as a union organizer. She mentions all of this briefly at the end. According to the author bio appended to the end of the paperback, Pitkin is now “the national field director of the Starbucks Workers United campaign for Workers United, an offshoot of UNITE.” 

The particular version of unionism that I write about on this blog, Relationship-Based Organizing, has been developed within the community of rank-and-file workers I organize closely with. It is in large part a reaction against the unsatisfying and sometimes troubling experiences we’ve had trying to “organize” with and “being organized” by many of the more manipulative but widespread practices in the mainstream labor movement. I only hope the latest generation of organizers entering the movement can see through the virtuosity of the labor movement’s writers and the charisma of the labor movement’s leaders to investigate the content of the methods being used, evaluate the results for themselves, and chart their own path. Don’t take my word for it, but I beg that readers don’t take Pitkin’s word for it either.