Labor & Employment Law

NYC Laundry Workers Fight Dirty Job-Killing Scheme

By Mike Hall

The 150 workers who clean more than 10 million pounds a year of New York City public hospital and morgue laundry are fighting yet another attempt to outsource their jobs.

The workers at the city?s Brooklyn Central Laundry (BCL), members of AFSCME Local 420, took to the streets and the courts last month to end the city?s Health and Hospitals Corp.?s (HHC’s) plans to privatize the laundry.

Several hundred Local 420, AFSCME District Council 37 and other city union members rallied outside HHC headquarters to protest its plans to send their jobs to a private New Jersey facility. Local 420 President Carmen Charles says management repeatedly tries to outsource the jobs even though:

we?ve proven, time and again, that our members can do this work cheaper than a for-profit company.

The same day, the union filed a suit in the New York State Supreme Court charging HHC with violating a 2005 agreement to keep the laundry services at the BCL.

At AFSCME.org, Clyde Weiss writes:

[T]he dispute has raged on and off since 1998, when HHC and the city?under the administration of Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani?first tried to privatize public hospital laundry services.

After a year-long fight that included candlelight vigils, marches, an arbitration and a lawsuit, HHC and DC 37 agreed work would continue at BCL?on condition that the public workers compete with a privateer. After a year, an independent panel would decide which proved the most cost-effective and efficient option? the public employees won that contest and HHC agreed, in 2005, to return all laundry services in house.

Click here for more on the laundry workers? struggle.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on September 13, 2010 (boomark / email).