Laundry Workers Prepare to Strike

Workers who clean the linens of half the hospitals in Southern California are planning to strike Thursday, part of a national campaign against laundry contractor Angelica Corp. that could disrupt services to healthcare facilities across the country.

Union leaders said Monday a majority of workers are set to walk off the job at 15 Angelica plants, including six in the Los Angeles area. They also said union truck drivers and healthcare workers will cooperate by refusing to handle linens delivered by striker replacements.

Officials of the company, based in Chesterfield, Mo., have assured hospitals that the work of picking up mounds of soiled linens and delivering clean folded bundles will be done at the usual pace by supervisors and replacement workers.

“We understand that there’s a strike Thursday, and we will be completely unaffected and operations will be normal,” said Steven Weiss, assistant director of business development for St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Others are taking precautions anyway. “We have ordered a significant amount of laundry in advance,” said David Langness, spokesman for Tenet Healthcare Corp., which operates 18 hospitals in the state. “We have stockpiled several weeks’ worth in most of our hospitals.”

Laundry outsourcing swept through the healthcare business some time ago and now very few hospitals handle their linens in-house. The publicly traded Angelica has capitalized on that trend by aggressively buying up industrial laundries and building new ones. It now cleans linens for about 4,500 health facilities with 185,000 beds, according to the company’s latest annual report.

The union backing the planned strike, Unite Here, wants Angelica to agree to health and safety improvements, a slower work pace and family healthcare benefits.

Union President Bruce Raynor said that as its industry’s largest employer, Angelica should set a high standard. The union represents workers at 24 of the company’s 35 plants. Seven have open contracts, and their workers will launch the strike Thursday morning, Raynor said.

Workers at eight more, including the six plants in Los Angeles, are permitted in their contracts to honor picket lines, which strikers will set up quickly.

“We hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but we have no other choice,” Raynor said.

The union, which owns a bank, is among the wealthiest in organized labor and should be able to provide strike pay through a long walkout, officials said.

Angelica has a history of health and safety violations, with $450,000 in actual or pending fines from federal and state health and safety agencies, according to the union.

Angelica President Steve O’Hara didn’t dispute the safety record, but attributed it to the union campaign. He said many inspections were prompted by complaints from union sympathizers, and that fines often were for minor violations.

But accidents also drew inspections in at least five cases, including one that involved an amputated finger at a plant in Vallejo, Calif., according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In that case, a safety device had been deliberately bypassed to boost production.

Raynor also wants Angelica to sign a pact known as a neutrality agreement, which would allow the union to try to organize the chain’s 10 nonunion plants without company opposition.

O’Hara said the company is a good employer that provides entry-level jobs and promotes from within. He said the union campaign is about pulling in new dues-paying members rather than helping workers. “They get $500,000 a year in dues from our workers now,” O’Hara said. “They want another $250,000.”

In a letter to shareholders last month, O’Hara said combating the union would have short-term costs but would pay for itself in the long run.

He also rejected Raynor’s neutrality proposal, insisting that workers should vote in a federal process sanctioned by the National Labor Relations Board. Unions say that process is unfair.

In a telephone interview Monday, however, O’Hara suggested that he was softening on that issue. “We’re not wed to NLRB elections,” he said. “We can live with neutrality.”