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• Community, Labor Rally to Support Superior Health Linens Workers 2/2/2007
  

  WHAT: Protest to demand that St Mary’s Hospital help improve working conditions for poverty wage workers at Superior Health Linens. ...

• Laundry Workers say Hazardous Working Conditions May Prompt Strike 11/20/2006. Brooklyn News 12
  Laundry workers in Brooklyn say hazardous working conditions may soon force them to go on strike.

  The workers at Central Laundry Service in Crown Heights say they deal with dangerous hospital paraphernalia every day. The workers clean the uniforms and linens for hospitals, hotels and restaurants. The union is now asking for a raise of at least 75 cents to a dollar for the workers. However, the laundry industry is only offering a raise of 16 cents.

• Linen factory picketed 11/16/2006. Yale Daily News
  Blowing whistles and shouting slogans, a crowd of laundry workers, labor organizers, city residents and Yale students protested what they called squalid and potentially illegal working conditions at New England Linen Supply's New Haven factory on Wednesday afternoon.

About the Industry

With 40,000 laundry workers in our ranks, UNITE HERE is the biggest laundry union in the U.S. and Canada. And we’re getting bigger.

There are three kinds of laundries: hospital linen, hotel and restaurant linen and uniforms. Most companies specialize. UNITE HERE is especially strong in linen, representing workers in that part of the industry and most linen laundry workers in many cities.

We’re drawing on our strength to organize the fastest growing—and mostly unorganized—part of the laundry industry, uniforms. Four big companies dominate this sector: Aramark, Cintas, Unifirst and G&K.

Cintas, the industry giant, is keeping wages, benefits and working conditions down throughout the uniform laundry industry. One of every three rented uniforms in the U.S. is from Cintas. And with over 27,000 employees and nearly $3 billion in yearly sales, the company sets the low standards that dominate the uniform industry.

Along with the Teamsters union (which represents laundry drivers), we’ve launched a campaign to bring justice to Cintas workers and raise standards throughout the industry.