You could not find a more striking physical contrast than that between AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and 2013 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Nohra Padilla. Trumka's a big, strongly built son of the coal fields; Padilla a slight, waif-like woman from Bogota, Colombia.

But both carry in their fiber the knowledge of what hard, dangerous physical labor feels like—and how fierce the struggle to get decent treatment and dignity for those who do it has been.

Padilla tells the audience that the world's 15 million informal recyclers—rag pickers—"express in our bodies real green jobs...but the earnings we have are hunger earnings." She led the effort to organize Bogota's garbage recyclers into cooperatives that could demand decent treatment. She and her colleagues are preparing to negotiate new contracts with the City of Bogota, as are other members of her network of recyclers in far-flung cities in Brazil, Mexico and India.

Padilla's organizing efforts were inspired, five years ago, by a visit with U.S. unions. She imagined a world in which informal recyclers received equal returns with those received by large multinational waste companies, and she has had to fight off efforts by the elite in Colombia to regain control of the value represented by recycled garbage.

This is an excerpt from "The Things Which Unite Us," by Carl Pope. Read the rest of the story at The Huffington Post.