By Lisa Belkin

It is the day before the union vote at the auto parts plant in Yazoo City, Miss., and Joanne Bunuan, emblem of the last hope of the labor movement in the United States, looks tired. She paces the length of Suite 122 of the Comfort Inn, which also doubles as her union office, wearing denim shorts, a vivid red T-shirt that says, "Union, Yes!" and a pair of floppy slippers decorated with neon-colored puppies. Exhaustion (or, perhaps, the slippers) has the unlikely effect of making her look even younger than her 23 years. She has slept for 9 hours during the past 48, and her meals today will be, in order, from MacDonald's, Burger King and Pizza Hut.

Marc Panepinto, who at the grizzled age of 30 is a union organizing old-timer and Bunuan's immediate boss, sits on the couch across from her, beneath a wall-size chart filled with hundreds of color-coded Post-It notes. He, too, could use some sleep. He knows, without looking, that the layers of notes show a vote that is too close to call, despite two months of nearly nonstop work to bring a union to Yazoo Industries. He worries that Bunuan (pronounced bus-NEW-in), 17 months out of college, is feeling the pressure of running her first campaign from start to finish. He worries that the company has something up its sleeve at the 11th hour. He worries that the sky is alarmingly blue, with no sign of clouds, a bad omen because he believes that rain brings good luck. He worries that there is something he is forgetting to worry about.

Suddenly, the door to the suite is flung open by Cathy Lowenberg and Paula Tusiani, both Bunuan's tutelage, to be union organizers, too. They are back from the Sunflower Supermarket, where Bunuan, with determined optimism, had sent them to order a "Union, Yes!" cake for the hoped-for victory party the next day. Out of breath, and trying not to giggle, they explain that while at the market they spotted another cake, one that they assume could only have been ordered by the company. Decorated with two white plastic cowboy boots, it reads: "The Union Is a Game! And a Damned Good Show. Give Them a Boot in the [expletive], and Kick'em Out the Door. Vote No."

Bunuan and Panepinto are fairly certain of when the cake is to be served--at the company's Thanksgiving luncheon, scheduled for this afternoon, the day before the union vote. Although the company describes the luncheon as an annual gesture of appreciation to its workers, the organizers see it as nothing more than bribery with turkey and sweet potatoes, not to mention a potential violation of the rules of the National Labor Relations Board, which prohibit a company from campaigning in the 24 hours before an election. Bunuan looks at Panepinto. Panepinto looks at Bunuan. They don't seem as tired anymore. When they speak, it is almost in unison: "So go get that cake."

If the American Labor Movement has a future--and the debate is fevered and fractious over whether it does--then it is in the young, exuberant, inexperienced hands of people like Joanne Bunuan. Bunuan is a union organizer at a pivotal moment for organized labor. More accurately, she is an organizer because it is a pivotal moment for organized labor. Relegated to bit-player status in a pro-business era, battered by scandals and mismanagement within its leadership, hemorrhaging by an estimated one million members in the past six years, the labor movement in the United States is trying to reinvent itself. In 1970, nearly 30 percent of all American workers in private industry were union members. Today, that figure is just under 11 percent, the lowest since the 1930's.

Finding their membership back at Depression-era levels, union leaders have been adopting Depression-era tactics, specifically the grass-roots formation of new locals. They take inspiration from the fact that it is a terrible time to be a worker. Real wages in the United states have declined 28 percent since 1973, and eight million industrial jobs have been lost since 1980, a reflection of the weakness of unions in a changing economy, but also a spark of hope for their rebirth. In 1994, nearly half of the campaigns overseen by the N.L.R.B. resulted in union victories.

"It's a crossroads," says Stanley Aronowitz, a professor of sociology at the graduate center of the City University of new York and author of several books on work and labor. "They're saying, We've been down so long, we might as well fight, because they have nothing left to lose."

To organize, you must have organizers, and that is where Bunuan comes in. John Sweeney, a legend in the annals of organizing, was elected president of the 40-year-old A.F.L.-C.I.O. last October, largely on the promise of a huge organizing push. One of his first acts was to give the equivalent of a blank check to the Organizing Institute, the branch of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. created in 1989 at the earliest signs of this sea change. In 1990, the Organizing Institute spent less than $400,000 to recruit and train 25 organizers. Last year it spent $2.8 million to display 150 new organizers, one of who was Bunuan. This year, it may spend as much as $4 million for some 320 organizers.

Because studies show that white, male organizers have the least success in workplaces, which are increasingly not white and not male, most of these new troops will be women and members of minorities. And because organizing is a life only someone with few other obligations can lead, nearly all of them will be young, often recruited straight out of college, and comfortable with the fact that home is whatever hotel room they are in.

Beyond that, they will be a diverse lot, if the group at the Yazoo City Comfort Inn is any gauge. They will include longtime union zealots like Panepinto, who grew up 'talking union' with his father, a construction worker, then went on to earn a master's degree in labor relations at the University of Illinois and to graduate from the Organizing Institute's first class. They will also include new converts like Bunuan, who moved to West Roxbury, Mass., from the Philippines when she was a year old; whose parents, a day-care provider and an office worker, distrusted unions; whose only career goal while at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was to "help people, but not by giving them handouts," and who stumbled on the Organizing Institute near the end of her senior year when she signed up for an interview only because it was required for a career-planning course.

They will be like Cathy Lowenberg, the daughter of a white father and a mother of Japanese, Spanish and Korean ancestry, who has always identified with the outsiders and the have-nots and who, as a student at the University of Washington, helped organize a protest to make the history of people of color a required part of the curriculum. But there will also be people like Paula Tusiani, the daughter of a business executive, who for most of her life knew only wealth and privilege living on the North Shore of Long Island and whose parents, when she first announced her organizing plans, wondered where they had gone wrong.

They will, more often than not, never have worked in most of the industries they set out to organize. None of the organizers in Yazoo City, for instance, have any experience in an auto parts plant, and they never did come to understand the exact meanings of the station names that the workers used, like Pull to Seat and Regular Engine. But at the same time, they will not care that they do not know. "We are aggressively organizing industries we never organized before," says Bunuan of her employer, the Laborers' International Union of North America, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. group whose 750,000 members work mostly in construction, not the auto industry, and which in the past year has gone after health care workers and poultry processors. "We feel pretty much free to organize anyone who wants to be organized."

They will, more likely than not, do that organizing with only a sketchy knowledge of the historical trends that brought their cause to this nadir in the first place. Bunuan was not yet born in the 1960's, when baby boomers began seeking different types of jobs from the ones their blue-collar, union-proud parents had. She was barely in elementary school during the 1970's, when the United states solidified the trend from an economy based in manufacturing, where unions were strong, to one based in service, where unions were weak, and when manufacturing jobs continued to migrate to the Deep South, where unions were few, and overseas, where unions were irrelevant. She was only 9 years old in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan fired 11,400 striking members of the professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, a move that management across the country took as permission to play hardball with unions.

And although she has certainly heard of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster president who went to prison in 1967 and disappeared in 1975, she sees him as a relic of a long-passed era, not as part of a documented pattern of union corruption, one almost as old as the modern union. She was just entering high school, for instance, in 1986, when the Federal Government indicted Jackie Presser, then president of the Teamsters, on charges of embezzlement and racketeering, a case that would eventually bring to light stories of murders, car bombings and cash taken away in suitcases by couriers for the mob. In short, she had no reason to be paying attention during the decades when unions, to much of the American public, came to stand not for uplifting workers but for strikes, violence, impotence and greed.

Although the young organizers may not fully understand how these forces lined up against them, they will do daily battle with them nonetheless. Union campaigns are brutal affairs with a veneer of civility over a deep, wide layer of animosity. They do not allow for compromise, because there is no such thing as a little bit of a union, and along the way, workers will find deep-seated beliefs that they did not know they had. The union organizers will tell them that management is abusing them and that their lives would be better if they would stand together and negotiate as a group for their rights. The company bosses will tell them that the union is misleading them and that all a union will bring is membership dues to a bunch of outsiders who will make a lot of new rules.

The union will call management "heartless"; management will portray the union as "outsiders." Family members will stop speaking to one another, as will co-workers and friends. Some of the most unlikely people will become leaders, and some of those will be fired. When each campaign is over, win or lose, the factory will never be exactly the same again, the workers will be inestimably changed, and the organizers will be altered, too. Everything will be different, including, over time, the whole of the American labor movement.

Bunuan is driving her rental car along an unpaved, unmarked road on the outskirts of Yazoo City, a community of 12,427 people, an hour north of Jackson. She passes acres of cotton fields, which had been lush and white when she arrived back in September, but which now, in late November, are scruffy and gray. Bunuan came to Yazoo in the first place because 80 of the 310 Yazoo Industries workers walked off their jobs to protest wages, and a colleague of Bunuan's, passing through the region, happened to see a report of the walkout on the local news. Bunuan and a scouting team came to town the next morning.

Piecing together what they could on the privately held company, they talked to the workers and learned that labor discontent was not new at the 16-year-old plant, a division of Hood Cable, which annually manufactures a reported $16 million worth of electrical systems for Cadillacs and Corvettes. In 1989 there had been another walkout, and the workers had even elected a person to speak with management on their behalf, but their representative was promoted to supervisor and the effort went nowhere.

Wages for line workers, the organizers learned, were between $5.55 and $5.70 an hour, which initially sounded low but which they would gradually discover was a solid wage in this community. The company, one of the area's largest employers, provided no pension and no seniority, the organizers were told, and its work force is mostly black and female, groups that tend to be more sympathetic to unions. So the organizing campaign began.

Bunuan has spent the months since then doing what she is doing now, driving around looking for workers. With her is Beatrice Griffin, herself a workers at the plant, and the kind of companion Bunuan likes best--an unswayable union supporter. In fact, Griffin says she has already suffered for her cause. When the union first came to town, Griffin was working in the office, close to management, handling paperwork, not electrical wire. One morning, she says, she was told by her supervisor to wear a "Proud to be Union-free" T-shirt but she refused. Three days later, she was taken from her $6.40-an-hour office job and given a $5.55-an-hour position on the line. The company says she was demoted because her work was unsatisfactory.

Bunuan and Griffin pass a house as gray as the surrounding fields, and Griffin says: "Stop. I think that's Jo Ann Richardson's car." Organizers never call ahead. They

simply show up. Bunuan looks around for growling dogs, her only real fear in this job, then heads toward the worker's door. As she does, her steps lengthen, so she strides rather than walks, and her shoulders square into her ready-to-tackle-all-comers stance. Richardson, a wiry woman in white sweat pants and a pink sweatshirt, answers Bunuan's knock.

When Bunuan starts to speak, she no longer sounds like herself. Instead of her usual Boston-tinged tones, her words take on a down-home Mississippi drawl. "I was hopin' we could talk for a bit about the union," she says . And her grammar slips, too. "If it ain't too much trouble, could we come in?" she asks Richardson. She says she doesn't plan the transformation, it just happens. "I think wherever I go I pick up the accent," she says. "If I'm talking to someone in a very kind of college accent, it just doesn't play right at all."

Most of her job as an organizer is about talking. The talking is done during visits, called "house visits." Research has shown that among campaigns in which workers are not visited in their homes, the win rate is 17 percent, but when they are visited in their homes at least once, the win rate jumps to 61 percent, which is why Bunuan and her team of organizers make visit after visit after visit. They go back to an address again and again, until the object of their search is found. They stop by late at night and early in the morning. They figure out who their target is dating, or where their target's mother lives, and they try those places too. They fight for each vote, face to face, one worker at a time.

One purpose of each house call is to teach workers about unions--what a union does and what it can do for them. Another is to teach the organizer about the workplace -- who in the plant is related to whom, who is friendly with whom, who talks to whom, who stands where on the factory floor and who stands near them. Bunuan has never been inside the Yazoo Industries building, a squat brick-and-chrome structure that looks like an elementary school. And she has never seen the lines of workers that twist bundles of wires together in ways that will eventually run radios and power windows.

Over the weeks, however, she has formed a mental map, and on it Regular Engine is in favor of the union, Bay 6 is against and Pull to Seat is unsure. Day shift in general is strong in its support, while night shift is equally strong in opposition.

Similarly, Bunuan is a newcomer to Yazoo City itself, never having heard of this place before the campaign. Yet she has mapped the emotional landscape, too, and knows that Denise Boddy's mother and stepfather are both in management at the plant, so Denise is probably a lost cause, and that Deborah Pepper has a relationship with a Gates man and that all the sisters in the Gates family are pro-union.

As she talks, she does so with the knowledge that hers is not the only voice these people are hearing. The company's counterattack began two days after she arrived in Yazoo City, and it came as no surprise. The plant used its longtime labor law form Kullman, Inman, Bee, Downing & Banta of New Orleans, as a consultant in its campaign, a common practice in the years since the air-traffic controllers' strike, and the campaign run by that firm was rich with the images and trends that have been the undoing of unions in recent years.

"The union is a third party, an outsider, a big business that exists only because it takes dues money" is how Sid Lewis, the company's lawyer, sums up the message he tries to give to workers at the company's weekly anti-union meetings. "To stay in business they need to get more members. They're salesmen and they're trying to push their product. That's what this is all about."

The company repeated that message in a storm of letters and leaflets mailed to workers' homes. "The union wants one thing," said one version, mailed Oct. 11. "A part of your paycheck every month. For what? Keep them out. Vote No!" Another mailing said: "$$$MONEY$$$. This is what the Laborers' is all about -- getting a piece of your paycheck. . . . And with the risk of strikes, you could go without pay, unemployment benefits, food stamps -- and you could have to pay for your own health insurance, which costs a family of four $300 each month. Can you afford to risk paying for your own health insurance? . . . Keep your money. Vote No."

In still another mailing, the financial statement of the Laborers' local in Jackson was enclosed with a letter that said: "The union doesn't want you to know about 1) Union salaries. 2) Union administrative and office expenses. 3) Union money paid to the International union. 4) Union fees. 5) Union fines. 6) Union dues. 7) Union 'other receipts.' 8) Union $300 initiation fees. 9) Union buildings and cars. 10) Union cash in the bank. Your money pays for their big expenses. Don't be fooled. Vote No!"

Shortly after that, the weekly pay envelope of every worker contained the following message: "One bird in your hand . . . is worth two in the bush . . . Suppose you had not gotten this paycheck due to a union strike? Be safe instead of sorry! Vote No." Bunuan has seen these mailings and she knew knows what is said in the meetings, because workers tell her. What she hears worries her. More than the supervisor, she has been told, has warned that the plant will close if the union comes in, that the company was recording workers' pro-union activities and that the union was not to be trusted because it was composed mostly of Mexicans and other foreigners. Bunuan hears that she, in particular, is regularly described as "young," with the implication that she is too inexperienced to be trusted.

Lewis calls nearly all the claims "nonsense." The company never threatened to close the plant, he says, no one was being spied on, "and the only reference to Mexico," he says, was when he told employees that "we need to stay competitive because a lot of jobs are going to Mexico. That's simply a fact." As for the descriptions of Bunuan, he says, she "is very young. And I think something like that is an issue for the workers. In my mind, I'm thinking, if I'm an employee: 'I've got 10 years on this kid. What can this kid do for me?'"

As she goes door to door, Bunuan hears echoes of the company's arguments in workers' questions. She has had practice fielding those questions, first at the role-playing sessions at the Organizing Institute, keep them from sounding to pat. "Why does the union require such hefty dues?" Dues are not hefty, she answers, only $16 a month, and they do not start until the first contract is signed. "Why does the union spend so much money paying people to organize?" If asked directly, she will say she makes $28,000 a year (more than twice what the average like worker as Yazoo makes, plus benefits and expenses), and those organizers who are not often on staff receive $400 a week, on the theory that the only way to find good people is to pay them. "Can the union promise to pay workers' salaries if there is a strike?" No, but strikes occur in only 2 percent of all contract negotiations. "Can the union guarantee that a union contract will include a raise?" No, the union cannot guarantee anything, but groups have more power than individuals.

It is too simple, however, to say that all workers concerns about unions are planted by the company, and Bunuan wrestles daily with doubts and hostilities whose roots are far more personal. Over the weeks of this campaign, for instance, she has spent hours talking with Linnie Williams, who has been a station operator on the Corvette line for 13 years and whose two brothers, both union members at other companies, have urged her to vote no. One of her brothers, she says, received a raise of 50 cents an hour, followed by a commensurately large raise in his union dues.

"I know what I do for a job," she says to Bunuan. "I go out and make a product. What do you folks do for a job? Do you go out and make anything? No. You make your living off of hardworking people like me."

Her brothers, she says, tell her that unions bring corruption, and she says she won't give money 'to fill union bosses' pockets." Bunuan answers that "like any other organizations, there can be some bad people, and it's the workers' job" to vote carefully for their leaders. "There's corrupt politicians; there's corrupt preachers," she continues by way of example. It turns out to be a wrong example for a Catholic from Massachusetts to use with a Baptist from Mississippi. "The union is not no church, I give my tithe and I get my blessings. A union is not going to give me my blessings, my strength, my life."

From conversations like these, Bunuan tries to decipher how each worker will vote and who can be swayed, assigning them a number that will determine their place on the chart on the Comfort Inn wall. Those in the "on"' column are actively working for the union, "twos" are people who seem to be in favor, "threes" seem undecided, "fours" are probable "no" votes, and "fives" are actively working to stop the union.

Sometimes, the predictions are easy. Just before her visit to Richardson, for instance, she stops in on Karen Anderson, who is expecting her fourth child in February and lives in an old house with a refrigerator out front and a striking lack of furniture inside. The only decoration is a small plastic radio shaped like a TV set, with a photo of New England foliage inside the faux screen -- the Christmas gift the company sent to its workers last year. While her daughters play nearby, Anderson complains to Bunuan that she has not yet received her disability payment from her maternity leave with her youngest child, who is now 2. She has little hope, she says, that she will be any more successful this time. "Would a union help me with that?" she asks. They would try, Bunuan answers, and feels no need to ask directly what Anderson's vote will be. As Bunuan leaves, she mentally makes a "two."

Some times, however, as with Linnie Williams, the predictions are more challenging. Although William's questions are hostile, Bunuan sees a pinhole, mostly because Williams comes to the weekly union meetings and reads the union literature in great detail, sometimes highlighting areas of particular interest, usually about the possibility of strikes. After one 45-minute house call, Williams says to Bunuan, "Maybe the union can be a good thing," and on subsequent visits says, "Uh-huh, I'm still with you," leaving the organizer hopeful but uncertain.

And sometimes, predictions are completely impossible. Shondra Garner, for instance. A shy woman, about the same age as Bunuan, she blossomed into a leader during the early weeks of the campaign, under the persistent coaxing of Bunuan and Lowenberg. She came to the weekly union meetings, she passed out leaflets in front of the plant and she even rode along on house calls. To Bunuan's team, she became something rare and risky during an organizing campaign -- she became a friend.

Then suddenly, a week before the election, her involvement stopped. She began to miss meetings, she was never home when the organizers came by and she became unwilling to listen when other pro-union workers approached her in the plant. "She's talking against the union," Griffin told Bunuan, and Bunuan became determined to find Garner. "It's my obsession," Bunuan says, as if finding garner and saying just the right words to bring her around would somehow bring all the other "no" votes around as well.

In fact, it is Garner they are looking for when they spot Jo Ann Richardson's car and knock on her door. With some reluctance, Richardson lets them in. "I'm busy," she says, sweeping her hand over the worn linoleum floor covered with newspapers in places where Richardson is completing a pre-Christmas ar project, applying gold spray paint to plain wooden picture frames.

"So how are ya feelin?" Bunuan asks, stepping around the newspapers and taking a seat in front of television set so that Richardson is not distracted by the program. "How are ya feelin' about the vote?"

"I'll be glad when this is over."

"Why is that?"

"I'm just tired of it, that's all.' She fidgets and looks eager to end the conversation.

"Do you think you're worth more than $5.55 or $5.70 an hour?" Bunuan asks, trying to get Richardson to talk.

"Yeah, but just because we get a union doesn't mean we're gonna get no raise."

Bunuan knows that in recent days, the company has been stressing that the union cannot make promises, that all contracts are subject to negotiation and that the workers could possibly end up with less than they have now.

"It's no guarantee," she says.

Griffin, who is sitting next to Bunuan, join in. "But without a union, ain't nobody gonna give you no raise."

"I don't know that," Richardson say.

Bunuan leans forward. "You're been there 10 years, right, Jo Ann? In those 10 years, did they ever guarantee you a raise?" she asks.

"No," Richardson says. "They ain't guaranteed us nothing. They can't guarantee us nothing. I know what I got now. I don't know what I get with you."

"Bunuan feels a vote slipping away. "With the union, you're negotiating those raises," she says. "You have a say in that. And they have to negotiate with you. If the union weren't gonna do no good, if they weren't gonna get you those raises, if they weren't gonna get you that contract, the company wouldn't care at this point. They wouldn't spend the money on the 'vote no' buttons, taking you off the line to have meetings for an hour, giving you doughnuts at those meetings."

"We make an O.K. wage," Richardson says. "At least we have a wage. Some people around town don't even have that."

"Some people don't, but some have more. How much do you think you're worth?" Bunuan asks, then she tells Richardson about the last big campaign she worked on, at the Sanderson Farms chicken plant in Hazelhurst, Miss., where the union won and wages increased by 30 cents an hour. What she doesn't tell her is how close that election was -- a vote of 223 to 195, a margin of 28 votes, meaning that 14 votes the other way could have brought defeat. And she certainly doesn't tell her that the memory of that near loss is responsible for today's frantic house-calling pace.

"If the union comes in, it's fine with me, and if it doesn't come in, it's fine with me," Richardson says, showing Griffin and Bunuan to the door.

Bunuan moved her from a "three" to a "four."

The American Legion Post N. 201 of Yazoo City was founded in 1961, and the building looks as if it has not been painted since then. There are handwritten signs on the walls, so faded as to be almost unreadable, that say, "Please No Profanity" and Please Respect Our Ladies." At the front of the room there is another sign, place there minutes ago by Bunuan, who is setting up for this afternoon's rally. This sign says, "Last Meeting Before Victory."

Around her, the room is filling up with workers arriving straight from the plant and talking about the company's Thanksgiving meal: turkey, ham, stuffing, yams, rolls, apple strudel and, someone says, "a cake that said something about how they'll kick our [expletive]." The original cake, Bunuan knows, is wrapped in packing tape and hidden in the Comfort Inn's refrigerator. Apparently, custom-order cakes are easy to replace at the Sunflower Supermarket.

"Linnie Williams is not at this rally; Bunuan had quietly hoped that she would be, that maybe she would truly come around, despite her brothers' warnings. Of the workers who are here, some have not come back from the job, because they have no job left to come from. They have been fired since the union campaign began. By Bunuan's count 11 people have been dismissed and 5 people have been demoted in the two months since she arrived. Yazoo Industries' lawyer, Sid Lewis, says the "actions in question had nothing to do with the union activities of the employees, if any, and were all due to other circumstances," but Bunuan believes otherwise.

Firings are a common event during union drives. Academic studies estimate that they occur in one out of every four campaigns. Federal law prohibits companies from terminating workers in retaliation, but since appeals of such dismissals can take years and the only penalty a company faces is reinstatement of the employee with back pay, it is a law with few teeth. "A few well-placed firings, even if they're illegal, can stop a union campaign in its tracks," says Patricia A. Greenfield, director of the Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

It was during the chicken plant campaign in Hazelhurst that Bunuan saw her first workers fired. She was devastated. Her boss, Panepinto, was on that campaign, too, and he offered her his way of coping with the firings. "I feel bad, but I don't feel guilty," he said. "Because I didn't do it. I've never fired a worker in my entire life. Companies fire people. And if you're on an organizing campaign and someone is discharged for trying to exercise their rights and to make something better, that was management that did that.

"If you get distracted on dealing with the terminations, it takes away from the campaign. The best way to get that person's job back is to win the election and then bargain that person's job back."

Bunuan's emotional armor, new and fragile as it was, was tested a year later, here in Yazoo City when the first firings in this campaign began. Organizers advise all their supporters to stick scrupulously to plant rules, to make it difficult for the company to find a pretext on which to fire them, but there are always lapses.

Mary Henderson, for instance, a 28-year-old employee with one year's tenure, was distributing handbills at the gate one Monday morning until 6:50 A.M., then she left the leaflet line and clocked in at the plant. She looked in her handbag for her protective wraparound glasses she says, and when she saw they were missing, she went out to her car, found them and came back within minutes. Her supervisor, she says, was waiting.

"They said, 'I got you now,'" Henderson says, speaking so quietly she can barely be heard. "They said: 'You're fired. Your work here is done. You clocked in and then left.' But I did the same thing before, many times. Everyone had done it. I wasn't even late. My record is clean. I always bring an excuse, and I have never had a write-up. The only thing I did was be involved with the union."

"As the list of dismissals grew, Bunuan turned once again to Panepinto, who told her a story that had been told to him by a friend, an organizer who had been teacher in el Salvador. Sometimes she would teach rural peasants to read and write, she said, and then government soldiers would come after she had gone and kill some of those newly educated villagers. "She said: 'I felt bad about that, but we had to do it. We had to teach people what their rights were and had to help them to improve their conditions.' That statement crystallized it for me. It's a small price to pay when people are trying to better themselves."

Bunuan took that story and repeated it to Lowenberg and Tusiani when they left their own levels of guilt at encouraging workers to be visible in their support even if it increased the chances that they would be fired. But although she delivered the same message in many of the same words, she feared they did not have the same impact. She was not even sure she believed them herself. Earlier in this campaign, Lowenberg knocked on the door of a young female worker, but the woman's mother answered and would not let Lowenberg in. "where will you be when this is all over?' the mother demanded of Lowenberg "You want her to stick her neck out, but how about you? When this is all over, you'll still have a job. Do you think about that?"

Bunuan certainly does, but she tries not to now, even as she sees some of the fired workers take their seats among the crowd of 75 people in the American Legion hall. Instead, she picks up the microphones and tries to project only confidence.

"Let's ask y'all are we gonna win tomorrow?" she says.

"Yes."

"I can't hear you."

"Yes."

"Y'all are better people for going through what you have the past few months," she says. "I just want to give y'all a hand for that."

The she asks if any of the workers have any things to add.

"We'll all black," says Ben Sims, who has been at Yazoo Industries for two years and who has been so affected by his experience that he has approached Bunuan about become a full-time organizer himself. "We all been slaves. Remember Dr. Martin Luther King. Remember Malcolm X. And remember, you are black and you are not a slave."

The rally ends with a prayer, given not by Bunuan but by another worker. "Our heavenly father, " she says -- to shout of "Say it sister!" and "Amen!" -- "we are here to try to get a union. To try to better ourselves from our hell hole out there. Touch all who are in doubt, Jesus. It's union time. Amen."

Bunuan feels the collective weight of every historical trend against the union as she and Ben Sims drive around Yazoo City looking for Shondra Garner. It is the night before the vote and they are running out of time.

Bunuan has been hearing secondhand hints of what Garner is thinking, but what she hears does not make her understand. "She says the union lies," Sharon Cole, a friend of Garner's and a union supporter, tells Bunuan "She says the union said they got a wage increase of $4 an hour at another plant, but it was only 30 cents."

Bunuan does not believe that any union representative ever said anything about a $4-an-hour raise.

"She says she was fooled but now a few people she knows told her about the unions and how they really are," says Sims, who talked to Garner at work earlier in the say, at Bunuan's urging. "She says her friends say the union went and lied."

Bunuan feels helpless in the face of these nameless friends. She has to find Garner and somehow win her back.

They stop first at the public housing project on Woolwine, a collection of drab, unwelcoming single-story bungalows directly across the street from the Yazoo Industries plant. This is where they think Garner's mother lives. But there is no sign of Shondra's maroon '83 Camry, so they drive over to Battle Street, an equally grim neighborhood, where Garner once lived and can sometimes be found. The car is not there, either, but Bunuan and Sims walk to the door of the darkened apartment and pound loudly. "if she's asleep, let's wake her up," Bunuan says. No one answers.

Next is magnolia, at another housing project. This is the address Garner uses, but she never seems to be there. Bunuan drives slowly past the house. The Camry is parked near the back of the building, in the shadows. She starts to back up, and as she does she sees a face at the window. Bunuan is sure it's Garner, but when she and Sims knock on the door, it is her sister who answers, "She's not here," she says, when asked about Garner. "I don't know where she is. She's not coming back here tonight. I can't get her no message."

The mystery of Shondra Garner is the mystery of many workers Bunuan meets on the campaign. Bunuan would never know for certain what changed Garner's mind, just as she would never really know what arguments reached, or failed to reach, each of the hundreds of other workers she has met in Yazoo City. As much talking and listening as the organizers do, they can only guess at what is going on in each worker's head. Even as they calibrate the "twos' and the 'fours" they know that some people are lying outright and that others are agreeing with them only for the moment, because it is easier than arguing. Even though they describe the workers as "frightened" or "angry" or "confused," they cannot feel that fear, anger or confusion themselves. With their rental cars and expense accounts, the organizers can't completely understand the details and decisions of the workers' lives.

As if by way of illustration, Bunuan yawns with exhaustion as she drives away from Shondra's sister house call.

"Tired?' Sims asks.

"Tired," Bunuan says, waiting for sympathy. Sims laughs instead.

"You're always laughing at jokes I didn't know I was making," she says.

"You say you're tired," Sims says, kindly but matter-of-factly. "You be tired, and I be the one running behind the line all day."

Later at the Comfort Inn, Bunuan arrives to find that Panepinto has just done a new tally of the wall, and his estimate is that the union will win by a vote of 153 to 140, meaning that if the house callers guessed wrong, and seven people they ranked as "twos" are really "fours" then the union will lose.

"Our goal was to move five people today," Bunuan says. "If we did that, we'd be very comfortable."

"Very comfortable," Panepinto warns, "is an extreme statement."

"O.K. We'd be comfortable."

"We're never comfortable. If you get comfortable, you get lazy."

"Five votes and we win," Bunuan offers.

"We'd have a shot at winning," Panepinto says.

They leave the hotel at midnight for the night-shift rally, which is very different from the day-shift version earlier in the afternoon. From the first weeks of the campaign, the organizers have met with hostility from the night shift, which was not involved in the walkout and shows little sympathy for the union. It is half the size of the day shift, and more tightly knit, and the organizers feel they never found a way to burrow in and grab hold.

Few workers from the night shift have come to the weekly union meetings held just for them at 12:30 in the morning. As a result, the organizers had few nigh-shift workers to take along on house calls to smooth the way with other night-shift workers. Their hostility puzzles Bunuan, because Yazoo Industries does not pay night differential, meaning the workers would be very likely to feel underpaid and angry, but house calls have showed they do not. Bunuan has essentially given up on the night shift, but she is still surprised when only seven people come to this last midnight rally, a showing so depressing that Bunuan worries that it will scare off some of those who actually showed up.

"She ends things quickly and returns to the hotel to give final instruction to Lowenberg and Tusiani. They are about to drive one hour south to Jackson, tot he nearest Kinko's Copy shop, where they will spend the rest of the night producing the leaflet they will hand out at the factory gate the next morning, the last leaflet before the vote. Bunuan stays behind, supposedly to get some rest. She knows she should be sleeping. But she can't stop staring at the Post-Its on the wall.

It does not rain on the morning of the vote, but it is foggy and freezing. Two union organizers crawl across the lawn to sneak a pro-union bumper sticker onto the plant manager's car, and they return soaked with dew. The freshly

spray-painted bed sheets that say, "What Are You worth?" and "You Deserve Better" are fluttering slightly, not from any breeze but because the volunteers who hold them are trembling in the cold.

Despite the fact that her teeth are chattering as the paces outside the plant at 5:50 A.M., Bunuan refuses to put a jacket over her red "Union, Yes!" T-shirt. If she did, then everyone else would, too, and she has spent days pleading with workers to wear those shirts this morning as a final demonstration of support. She clings to the hope that the T-shirts, and the solidarity they stand for, might be the last word in the debate for one or two workers, the thing that sticks in their minds and maybe changes them. She would rather freeze for an hour this morning than kick herself for weeks afterward.

She is losing her voice, but she raises what is left of it to lead the group of organizers and workers in a determined chant: "What time is it?" "Union time." "What time is it?" Union time." The line of cars, headlights on in the predawn mist, grows longer, and she stops each one to hand out a flier. "Ya gonna come on out and help us leaflet, now?" she asks every driver in a red T-shirt. Many of them do, and soon there are more than 50 people hollering and celebrating at the Yazoo Industries gate.

Linnie Williams drives in, wearing a white T-shirt, and for a moment, Bunuan feels even more of a chill. Williams clearly has not changed her mind after all. What Bunuan could not know is that Williams never came close to changing her mind. "I told them what they wanted to hear," she would say later about her hot-and-cold behavior. "I said, 'Yeah, I'm gonna join the union,' because then I don't have to be bothered by them anymore."

It is the first morning in a long time that there are no counter-chants coming from the steps of the plant. All week, about a dozen workers in anti-union shirts have been in front of the factory when the organizers arrive, dancing and shouting things with a far better beat than the ones favored by the pro-union group: "pork chop, pork chop, greasy, greasy. We'll beat the union, easy, easy." The day before the vote, they had even worn cheerleader skirts and carried pompons. "Go back," they yelled, 'go back. Go back to the woods. We don't need no union and we know you're no good." They drove Bunuan crazy.

But this morning, possibly because of Federal regulations limited the company's campaign in the hours before the election, they are not there. The only shouts, the only jolts of energy, all come from the union. There are more red T-shirts than Bunuan had expected, and more people distributing leaflets. For the first time, she truly believes her side will win.

"At 6:50, the workers leave the line and walk toward the factory to clock in. It is the moment Bunuan always hates, as she watches them turn from "empowered grown-ups, my equals" into "drones at the whim of some boss." A few workers, including Griffin, have taken the day off and stay with the organizers, but the enthusiasm of moments earlier is gone. They are all about to leave, when at 6:59, Shondra Garner in her Camry comes barreling past, not stopping to take a leaflet, and not looking at Bunuan. She beeps the thinning crowd out of the way and drives on through.

The voting begins at 12:30 P.M., and only the N.L.R.B. representative and two workers chosen as observers are allowed in the room where the ballots are being marked. The organizers fill the hours with superstition and last-minute details. They send an anonymous fax to the company that simply says, "D.O.G.," which stands for "Death or Glory," and which Laborer's International organizers have faxed to companies since there were fax machines, although no one seems to know why. They send Tusiani to the Sunflower market with an intern to tell the bakery that only the intern can pick up the union's victory cake later that day. They field calls from workers inside the plant who tell them which "twos" are absent; they find those workers and drive them to vote. They also give rides to those fired during the campaign, whose votes will be sealed in separate envelopes and counted only if the union wins an appeal of their dismissal.

At 3:30, they go back to the plant to leaflet the night shift. It is a sobering experience. Almost no one is wearing the union's shirts, and only one worker joins the leaflet line. Bunuan's voice is completely gone, and Griffin takes up the chants. Bunuan is pleased with the symbolism -- the workers taking on the role of leaders -- but there simply aren't enough people to make any significant noise. Things improve a bit as the day-shift workers come out and join the chant, and someone pulls a car onto a grassy area near the leafletters, opens the doors and turns up the volume on the radio so everyone can dance. But almost immediately, an anti-union group forms on the steps and all but drowns out that effort. Few cars, if any, are stopping for leaflets. Panepinto says leadenly: "It's over. We're going to lose.

Bunuan refuses to accept his pessimism. "I still think we're going to do it," she says. "This morning's vote is locked in. These nigh-shift folks don't change that. These people now are people we never counted on. It feels bad, but we knew this was coming. It doesn't change how great it felt this morning."

"There are more highs and lows in a day in this job than most people get in a career," Panepinto says, not convinced but seeing no purpose in a debate.

The vote begins at 4;15 P.M., and ends at 5:30, just after the sun sets. As Bunuan and Panepinto march up the steps and into the plant, a group of pro-union workers prays in the parking lot. "Don't let them come back here in the dark with nothing, Lord," someone says.

The organizers are led by the company's lawyer into the plant's lunchroom, where the N.L.R.B. representative stands behind a table, on top of which is a cardboard box. About two dozen plant managers, in white anti-union shirts, are in a semicircle around the table. Bunuan and Panepinto walk past them, saying nothing, and stand at the front of the group. The representative explains the voting procedure, makes a list of the votes that the union or the company plans to challenge and opens the box. As he reads the votes, the two observers -- one worker chosen by the company, one by the union -- record them on paper. Linnie Williams is the observer chosen to represent the company.

The union is behind from the start and never pulls ahead. The final vote is 160 against, 146 for, a difference of 14 votes. The numbers do not include the 15 challenged votes still sealed in envelopes, meaning that technically, this is still a contested election and not a loss for the union. But since only 13 of those votes, by Bunuan's count, are expected to be pro-union, a union victory is not very likely. Someone runs to the lunchroom door to shout the news to the workers on the line, and moments later there is pandemonium as more than 100 people leave their stations and run, screaming wildly, toward the front of the factory. Bunuan and Panepinto get caught in the crowd and cannot reach their troops who stand on the other side of the parking lot, waiting for news. But the pro-union workers don't really need their leaders to tell them what happened. The realization dawns as dozens of people in white shirts stream onto the factory steps and begin to dance.

Bunuan spends the rest of the evening at the American legion hall, consoling the workers, taking statements that could be used to challenge the company's conduct and therefore overturn the election, and promising to return to Yazoo City for another vote as soon as N.L.R.B. rules allow. Eventually, the crowd goes home, and Bunuan does, too, or more accurately, to the hotel room that has come to pass for home. "We fought a good fight," Panepinto tells her, "but you can's pull the lever for people. You can't step in the box for folks."

They have planes to catch in the morning (a brief stay at home, then back to Mississippi to organize some chicken plants), and they have a lot to pack, but first, there is one thing left to do. They go to the hotel refrigerator, remove the purloined cake and carry it back to the union office. There, using a plastic knife from a fast-food restaurant, they hack the cake into bits.

Source: The New York Times Magazine (January 21, 1996)