If you have spent much time in the labour movement, you probably know the iconic worker’s anthem “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, “ with its tribute to Joe Hill, the famous Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer and songwriter who was framed and legally murdered by the business class in 1915. You will also probably know that Hill’s last message to fellow workers was “Don’t Waste Any Time Mourning. Organize!”
Joe Hill got it half right. True, organizing is the heart of the workers’ movement, the vitally important activity that creates unions and broad social movements. But Hill’s injunction against mourning is bad advice. We need to mourn our losses, among them the workers dead before their time, sacrificed on the altar of profit. We need to recognize and mourn the world-destroying impacts of late capitalism on our beloved planet and on our own bodies. We also need, desperately, to acknowledge and mourn our political and emotional setbacks and losses, both the ones imposed on us by the business class and the ones we inflict on ourselves when we end up fighting each other instead of the bosses. Sometimes we can only see the truth through a lens of tears, the tears the Roman poet Vergil taught us lie at the centre of all things.
Too often we let the natural and healing process of grief be undercut by macho posturing and that is not only psychologically damaging, but also damaging to our effectiveness as organizers. Our grief, faced frankly, can clarify our minds and renew our energies, and help resolve the inevitable conflicts that emerge in our movements.
These reflections are inspired by reading an important new book which I commend to your attention, On The Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union by American labour organizer Daisy Pitkin. Pitkin is one of the two women referenced in the title. The other is Alma Gomez Garcia, a worker at one of the industrial laundries in Phoenix, Arizona Pitkin was assigned to organize by her union, Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) in 2003. The book provides a valuable reflection on the role of women in the labour movement, the nature of friendship and the contradictions of solidarity.
Thrown together in the difficult struggle to organize mainly female and racialized workers doing dangerous, dirty work for low pay, Daisy and Alma became friends and political allies, despite their many differences of background and privilege. The relationship came to a painful end in a confusing intra-union struggle, and Pitkin’s book represents an attempt to come to terms with her own failures as an organizer and as a friend. It is also a heartfelt statement of hope and commitment to the process of organizing with other workers to improve their lives. It is an instructive political memoir and a work of searing literary beauty, a dual achievement that rarely occurs. Think Emily Dickinson meets Emma Goldman.
On The Line is cast as a letter from Daisy to Alma, looking back on their time together in Phoenix several decades later, after class, race and internal union politics drove them apart. It is a detailed, human look at the difficult task of organizing a new workplace, evoking the excitement and the exhaustion that Daisy and Alma experienced going door to door trying to persuade Alma’s fellow workers to join the union. It also describes the many tricks and stratagems deployed by Sudexho management and lawyers in their attempts to break the back of the organizing drive. (Sudexho, later Sudexo ,was the multinational French giant firm that operated the factory/laundry where Alma worked.)
Daisy Pitkin is quick to acknowledge that her white skin privilege, her U.S. citizenship, and relative class privilege all worked to make her life and her options very different from those facing Alma. She tells a story from early on in her time in Phoenix when others involved in the organizing drive joked about how soon Pitkin will be promoted away from direct organizing into more lucrative and easier work in the union hierarchy, which does eventually happen. She also reflects, honestly and critically, on the model of “organizing from above” practiced by UNITE in the early years of the new century, and on her own personal failings. And her quick and mordant character sketches of some of the other organizers involved in the Phoenix campaign, especially those brought in when UNITE merged with Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) in 2004 are equally unsparing, as is her critique of some of the organizing strategies that HERE brought with it into the merged union.
The merger only held for half a decade, and by 2009 it had devolved into bitter and complex infighting, a heartbreaking process that left Daisy and Alma on opposite sides. As Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect in 2009, “…SEIU UNITE and HERE are the unions that have bettered the lives of more low-income workers over the past several decades than any others, which makes the campaigns they are currently waging against each other all the more dispiriting.” (SEIU, the Service Employees International Union had taken in many of the UNITE locals and activists who left UNITE HERE during the disputes that damaged Daisy and Alma’s friendship.)
But these failures and heartbreaks are not reasons to quit organizing, Pitkin eloquently argues. We need cleansing grief and the comforts of both personal friendship and political solidarity to change the world, and Pitkin’s book celebrates the difficult places where those needs intersect. She closes her book with a touching account of her reconciliation with Alma and with a ringing call for her readers to get active and get organizing, especially in our era that seems to be moving back toward grassroots organizing and labour struggles to match those at the beginning of the 20th century. Although Pitkin does not quote Gramsci, her remarkable memoir is an example of the qualities that Italian anti-fascist said were essential for a revolutionary- “Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
If you are looking for a way to support workers as they organize, take a look at the webpage for UNITE HERE in Canada to learn about organizing drives and solidarity events. Our tasks are clear. If we belong to a union already, we need to fight to make it more democratic and effective, and if we are not yet in a union, we need to find one and join it. We can both mourn and organize at once, and we must.
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