Daisy Pitkin’s On The Line recounts the ups and downs of a bold five-year campaign to organize industrial laundry factories in the notoriously anti-union state of Arizona. Pitkin offers readers a participant’s insight into what it took to forge solidarity so powerful that it overcame hazardous working-conditions, broken labor laws, and vicious opposition from the employer.

After years of aggressively anti-teacher rhetoric and hostile national educational policy, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators took over the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in 2010 on the pledge to fight for the schools that teachers, students, and Chicago’s communities deserve. In 2012 the CTU led an inspiring strike that won massive community support and contributed to revitalizing the tradition of labor militancy.

For this virtual launch event for On The Line, Daisy Pitkin will be joined by former CTU president Jesse Sharkey to discuss what it will take to rebuild a fighting labor movement and how at their best unions can reach beyond the workplace and transform whole communities.

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Order a copy of On The Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union from Pilsen Community Books:

https://www.pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/G_f3vj27PIe7xAkkeZifrA

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Speakers:

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. Her essays have been awarded the Montana Prize, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, the New Millennium Award, and the Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She grew up in rural Ohio and received an MFA from the University of Arizona. Pitkin lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she works as an organizer with an offshoot of the union UNITE. Find her at daisypitkin.net.

Jesse Sharkey is a teacher in the Chicago Public School system, and the former president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Pilsen Community Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.