 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
|
Hospitality
Unite Here! Fighting for Justice for Laundry Workers
With more than 30,000 laundry workers, Unite Here represents more laundry workers than any other union in North America. Our members clean linen for hospitals, hotels and restaurants and uniforms for thousands of businesses across both the U.S. and Canada. Unfortunately, while many of these laundries provide services for some of our countries’ richest corporations, they often pay little more than the minimum wage, and rarely pay enough to support a family. Unite Here has fought hard to make laundries pay a living wage.
Our members clean linen for hospitals, hotels and restaurants and uniforms for thousands of businesses across both the U.S. and Canada.
Unite Here has also been in the forefront of the fight to improve working conditions in the laundry industry, where employment-related injuries occur at an unacceptable rate and where employment-related injuries are accepted by owners as a cost of doing business.
RECENT VICTORIES
In 2008-2009, more than a thousand laundry workers moved toward better lives and safer workplaces by joining Unite Here. Newly organized workplaces include:
Angelica workers in Worcester, MA
New England Linen workers in CT and NJ
Prudential Overall Linen workers in CA
ARAMARK Uniform Service Workers in Denver and Salt Lake City
In addition, Las Vegas laundry workers won a dramatic contract victory in 2008, with the help of Unite Here Culinary Local 226. This victory raised the bar for laundry workers across the U.S. and Canada. With the support of tens of thousands of casino workers, 1,500 laundry workers forced Mission Industries to provide the "Las Vegas standard," full family health care. In an industry where even individual health care is rare, and where no health care is the norm, the victory at Mission Industries shows the union difference with Unite Here.
