New Haven Independent

A “labor summit” in the basement of the First & Summerfield Church Monday came nine months after a campaign launched to organize 100 workers at the New England Linen commercial laundry facility in New Haven. (Click here and here for background on the company and workers’ accounts of conditions inside the Derby Avenue plant.)

Seven women who work at the plant, donning company shirts, sat in the back of a basement room as about 80 representatives from five New Haven area unions and the Laundry Workers NY Joint Board gathered with sympathetic city politicians to talk about the drive.

Citing OSHA violations, low wages and a recent NLRB finding that the company had made “improper statements” to employees about a union organizing drive, the Board of Aldermen condemned the company through a resolution passed in March.

The women themselves preferred to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, union organizers said.

In their silence, others spoke out in a gesture of solidarity designed to create public pressure around the drive, but without specific action to further it.

José Melendez (pictured above), who works at a similar type of laundry facility called Unitex Textile in Hartford, described the arduous, balmy work with industrial washing and drying machines.

“If the temperature is 90 degrees outside, it’s 15 to 20 degrees hotter inside the plant,” he said. With steam from the washers and heat from the dryers, “you’re sweating the whole time.” The difference is, Melendez is unionized.

“It’s rough, it’s hot, but through our union and through our contract, they have to respect us,” he told the crowd. While jobs at Unitex start at only 25 cents above minimum wage, he said, the union got him benefits NE Linen workers don’t have — a guaranteed pay raise each year and free health care. NE Linen workers can pay as much as $80 per week for health care for their families, according to union organizers.

“It’s unfair the way they be treated,” said Melendez of the NE Linen workers, the majority of whom are women of color. “We have the right to sit across from the employer and lay down what we would like to have.” Without a union, workers “can’t open their mouths and say anything — their voices are not heard.”

Union activists are seeking to come to an agreement on a fair elections process above and beyond the National Labor Relations Act, which they reject as too weak because, for example, it allows the employer to hold captive meetings with employees.

“The NLRB process is broken — it does not work for these workers,” said Wilfredo Larancuent, president of the Laundry Workers New York Join Board of UNITE HERE. “They need a process that is fair, free of intimidation.”

New England Linen declined comment for this story. John Ryan, president of New England Linen and North East Linen, a plant in New Jersey that UNITE HERE is also trying to organize, would not be available for comment until Wednesday, NE Linen staff said.

The union produced a letter in which Ryan agreed to hold an election for its workers, but under circumstances that the union rejected. Date March 6, 2007, the letter calls for an election to take place with only two weeks notice, and with a gag order imposed for both sides.

After Larancuent’s and others’ remarks, the press — this reporter — was escorted out of the room while the mayor and eight aldermen remained inside for a closed meeting with union reps, where they heard brief testimony from workers.

No action was taken, except for aldermen signing on to a letter to the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority asking it to monitor NE Linen’s output of chemicals into the water system.

Mayor John DeStefano emerged with supportive words for the women fighting an uphill battle to unionize. “They’re vulnerable” against a powerful employer, he said. “These women have to pave the road.”

“The situation that they described there reminds me of the 1900s,” said Hill Alderman Jorge Perez, citing tales of rats, roaches, low pay and high health care costs. “If you want a poster child for [workers in need of] a union drive, there’s your poster child.”

“When you meet with workers,” said East Rock Alderman Roland Lemar, “you do worry that they’re being exploited. The environment they’re in with the management is so wrought and scary” that they would best be protected by a union, he said.

The company, contacted for comment, said no one was available.