Fabrice Robinet

In the back of the store, stacks of dirty shirts spilled from a few laundry carts alongside an ironing board, as clients entering the place were fighting their way through the crowd of protesters to drop off their laundry at the counter.

“I’ve been working here for 15 years in the same misery,” said Ricarda, 44, who insisted she be identified only by her first name because of her immigration status. A single mother of two from Mexico, Ricarda was being paid around $7 an hour — about half the city’s minimum wage for small businesses — while working up to 72 hours a week without overtime benefits.

Ricarda then aimed her complaints directly at her boss: “When I went to the hospital, I still had to come to work”; “I asked you to install ventilation, and it made you laugh”; “Your brother shoves me and looks at me sideways.”

As she spoke, two activists tried to translate from Ricarda’s native Spanish into English, then into Chinese for her employer, Huanxin Chen.

And one more thing, she told him, after handing him a letter listing her demands: “My name is not Richa. It’s Ricarda!”

To many immigrants in New York, laundries — both owning and working in them — can mean an opportunity for a better life. With little customer interaction, the business is appealing to those still learning English. And because having a washer and dryer is still considered a luxury here — a recent search on StreetEasy showed that only a third of its listed properties featured units — there is a strong demand in the city for wash-and-fold drop-off services.

This has propelled the growth of roughly 4,000 licensed laundries in the city, most of them either coin-operated laundromats that also provide wash-and-fold services or dry cleaners that do the same, plus ironing, according to New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

Retail laundries offer steady, physical work that tends to attract immigrant workers who have no documentation. Many, according to academics and industry professionals, are Hispanic women, like Ricarda.

For those same reasons and because New York laundromats are often profitable, said Brian Wallace, the president and chief executive of the Coin Laundry Association, the industry draws a great many immigrant entrepreneurs as well, a large portion of whom are Chinese, like Chen.

“I didn’t speak good English, and it was hard for me to find a job,” said Chen earlier this summer. He moved to New York with his family in 2009 and bought his store that same year after spotting it in a for-sale ad in a local Chinese-language daily.

But tensions between laundry workers and their employers are becoming more visible as some of the city’s lavanderas have taken very public steps to fight for their rights, leading demonstrations and filing lawsuits to claim tens of thousands of dollars in back wages.

In this struggle, though, the wins can be bittersweet. Owners say they’ve had to cut employees’ hours to meet their demands for minimum wage.

Chen has denied the claims Ricarda made against him at the protest last winter, adding that false rumors about him and his family have since spread throughout Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, where they live.

“They come to the store and give away flyers,” he said of the protesters. “They mess with us all the time.”

Owners have found themselves on the defensive, as an advocacy group, the Laundry Workers Center, spearheads a wave of organizing throughout New York City’s laundromats, leading secret trainings and connecting the laundry employees to lawyers.

Still, it’s incredibly hard to organize workers who fear retaliation or, worse, being deported.

“They say: ‘I don’t have a choice. I have to survive, pay for my rent. I know they’re stealing from me. But if I take action, I’ll lose my work,’” explained Mahoma López, a co-director of the center.

Retail laundries, traditionally small and with only a few employees, have a long history of exploitation.

According to Jenny Carson, a labor history professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, industrial laundries, often set up in garages and basements with no ventilation, started cropping up around New York City in the first half of the 20th century.

Workers’ arms and hands were burned from the use of chemicals. Often, they developed rheumatism, respiratory issues, heart ailments or muscle pain.

By 1930, laundries were the country’s largest industrial employer of black women, many of whom came from the South.

Carson traces the field to a long tradition of African Americans washing clothes in private homes during slavery and the Jim Crow era. “Laundry work, from its inception, has always been associated with women of color,” she said.

Conditions have improved in industrial plants, and unions are largely credited for elevating these standards. Many companies outside the city used by hospitals and restaurants, like Unitex Healthcare Laundry Services and White Plains Linen, offer guaranteed full-time work, as well as health and retirement benefits.

But on the storefront level, workers are struggling. Solidarity cannot be built because employees often work alone during their shifts. And according to Stephanie Luce, a professor of labor studies at the City University of New York, unions lack the resources to organize such a dispersed workforce, one store at a time.

“It takes so much time and energy to form a union,” said Luce. “Most of the time, we don’t see that work being put in such small places.” The diversity of retail laundry workers, she added, also requires organizers to speak several languages.

Perhaps what inhibits collective organizing the most, though, is the ruthless competition among laundromats, sometimes within the same block.

There are so many of them in the city, if one started charging customers 30% more to pay for employees’ benefits, it would go out of business, said Megan Chambers, a co-manager of the Laundry, Distribution and Food Service Joint Board, Workers United, SEIU.

“It’s a race to the bottom,” she said.

Also, if a union targets one laundry, its owner could easily avoid the fight by selling it or filing for bankruptcy. “There’s simply nothing to stop employers from closing up on workers, moving elsewhere and reopening under a different name,” Chambers said.

On the other hand, because they are in such high demand here, retail laundries tend to be profitable, which is why they remain attractive to newly arrived entrepreneurs.

“The more people, the more dirty clothes; that is an irrefutable law of physics,” said Wallace, of the Coin Laundry Association.

According to Wallace, profit margins in the field range between 20% and 25%, once the initial investment is paid off. It costs $200 per square foot on average to build and equip a store, with the help of a wholesale distributor.

“After that, it’s a pretty straightforward business,” he said.

David Yu and his wife, Susan Guan, moved from China to Brooklyn 20 years ago. Yu bought his first laundromat in 2005 in Greenpoint for $70,000, with the help of his parents and money he’d saved working in construction and restaurants here.

“The startup costs are higher than a restaurant, but there is less competition and it’s more stable,” Yu said last month.

He and his wife ran the small store of 40 machines themselves. They worked tirelessly until the wee hours, making around $3,000 a month at first.

“On Mother’s Day,” Yu recalled, “the children asked me, ‘Where’s mother?’ I said, ‘There’s no mother; mother is at work.’”

Now Yu owns seven laundries around the city — all named after his wife — including a large 24-hour location in Flushing, Queens, where 170 machines can return as much as $20,000 in gross monthly sales.

Although he complained that rising rents, competition and the increased minimum wage in New York were eroding his profits, Yu, who bought a house in Queens and has sent two of his children to college, has built a comfortable life here.

These days, he said, he employs 25 people in total, most of them Hispanic women.

Yu prides himself on paying his employees the legal minimum wage ($13.50 an hour for small businesses) and sick leave. (One worker at a Queens location confirmed this.)

But he is aware of employees’ rights violations at other laundries.

“These are usually mom-and-pop stores who are taking advantage of new immigrants,” Yu said.

Many of the laundry workers experiencing these violations are here illegally, and they are often hesitant about speaking up. They complain “at a significantly lesser rate than workers in other low-wage industries,” said James Rogers, the deputy commissioner for worker protection at the New York State Department of Labor.

Rogers said it would possibly help if the department initiated more investigations of laundromats and dry cleaners, recalling how it did such a thing with nail salons. But a proactive stance like this, he added, would require the agency to partner with grassroots groups that could help organize the workers.

This is where the Laundry Workers Center, created in 2011, comes in. But it has taken the organization several years to mobilize such a fractured workforce. Along the way, the nonprofit gained some experience with other low-wage industries like the restaurant business, which has a greater tradition of collective action.

Its first big success was being part of a campaign at the original Hot &amp; Crusty bakery and cafe in Manhattan, where the center helped workers form a union and obtain better working conditions.

One of the Hot &amp; Crusty workers who had emerged as a spokesman of the movement was López. He became an organizer with the Laundry Workers Center, eventually getting involved in the laundromat conundrum.

“A restaurant worker knows what to do because there are a lot of examples of protests and word-of-mouth from worker to worker,” López said. “A laundry worker is not at this level.

“There’s just no communication among them,” he added. Even within the same laundromat, employees often don’t see one another between shifts.

A breakthrough came in 2016 when the nonprofit decided to conduct a survey, which was published last year. For two years, Laundry Workers Center members posed as consumers in about 100 randomly chosen laundromats around the city, observing and interviewing the workers.

The survey found that one in five employees was paid below minimum wage, while 36% of them did not receive proper overtime compensation. Nearly a third surveyed claimed to have no sick or vacation days.

The study also pointed to what Yu said: The small, family-owned laundromats with one or two employees, rather than bigger stores, are disproportionately more responsible for work violations.

Eventually, the center persuaded a group of laundry workers who participated in the survey to attend weekly training sessions, which would lead to protests and demonstrations.

The first protest took place in June 2018 at TYS Laundromat, a family-owned business in East Harlem, making it, according to the center, the first organized laundromat in the city.

“They’ve started paying us minimum wage and we now have better working conditions,” said Perla, one of the campaign’s organizers, who requested that only her nickname be used because of her immigration status.

Immediately after the protest, Perla’s pay was increased from $9 to $12 an hour — New York City’s minimum wage in 2018 for small businesses. But then in November, her weekly hours were cut from 66 to 40, right below the overtime limit.

“We make more or less the same as before,” she said.

Her boss, Xiong Lin, who bought TYS in 2015 and has yet to get his initial investment back, said he couldn’t afford to pay Perla overtime.

“If I’m Google, no problem, but not for a laundromat,” Lin said. TYS, which competes with two other laundromats in a two-block radius, earns him a monthly net income of over $4,000.

Lin, 31, moved from China to New York as a teenager with his family. “For most Chinese people here, it’s either restaurants or laundromats,” he said.

Despite having her hours cut, Perla, who came here from Mexico 12 years ago, said her work situation has improved.

“My feet used to be swollen from standing 11 hours a day, six days a week without sitting,” she said, adding that she couldn’t take any breaks then and had to skip meals, which gave her chronic gastritis.

These days, Perla is allowed a 30-minute pause for lunch. She also said that Lin now provides workers with gloves and masks for the use of bleach and to deal with the lint coming out of dryers. “My throat used to burn at the end of my shift,” she said.

Lin contended that he had always complied with safety standards. He also denied any accusation of abusive treatment outside of not paying his workers fairly.

Last November, Perla and another co-worker filed a lawsuit against TYS, seeking back pay for unpaid minimum wage and overtime. A settlement was reached this month: Lin has agreed to pay his two workers $150,000 in total and to keep employing them at least 40 hours a week.

Back at Sunshine Shirt Laundry Center in Bay Ridge, Ricarda’s hope for better work conditions was short-lived.

Three weeks after she participated in the protest last February, her hours were cut.

Similar to what had happened to Perla at TYS, Ricarda saw her pay increase to $13.50 an hour from around $7, but with her decreased weekly hours, she was making $164 less than what she used to.

Ricarda’s financial situation became so dire that her older son, who was finishing high school, decided he would start working after graduation instead of going to college.

Ricarda’s lawyer, Lina Stillman, estimates that she is owed close to $200,000. After a failed mediation, Ricarda and a co-worker filed a complaint. The case is continuing.

Chen, 52, claims that he doesn’t owe his employees any money and that he’s always paid them fairly. And he contends that the bad publicity and weekly picketing in front of his store after the protest made his business decrease by 60%.

“I’m losing thousands of dollars every month,” he said in June.

That same month, Chen closed up Sunshine Shirt Laundry Center for good.

“Now, I need to find another job,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/nyregion/nyc-laundry-workers-unionizing.html" id="ac5d0516-10fe-3782-a8c3-8576f9a1ab87">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — One afternoon last February, in front of dozens of riled-up protesters and two police officers, a small, visibly distraught woman confronted her employer at Sunshine Shirt Laundry Center, a family-owned cleaner in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Laundry Workers Are Fighting Back

As she spoke, two activists attempted to translate from Ricarda’s native Spanish into English, then into Chinese for her employer, Huanxin Chen.

To many immigrants in New York, laundries — both owning and working in them — can mean an opportunity for a better life. With little customer interaction, the business is appealing to those still learning English. And because having a washer/dryer is still considered a luxury here — a recent search on StreetEasy showed that only a third of its listed properties featured units — there is a strong demand in the city for wash-and-fold drop-off services.

This has propelled the growth of some 4,000 licensed laundries in the city, most of them either coin-operated laundromats that also provide wash-and-fold services or dry cleaners that do the same, plus ironing, according to New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

But tensions between laundry workers and their employers are becoming more visible as some of the city’s lavanderas have taken very public steps to fight for their rights, leading demonstrations and filing lawsuits to claim tens of thousands in back wages.

“They say: ‘I don’t have a choice. I have to survive, pay for my rent. I know they’re stealing from me, but if I take action, I’ll lose my work,’” Mahoma López, a co-director of the center, explained.

Workers’ arms and hands were burned from the use of chemicals. Often, they developed rheumatism, respiratory issues, heart conditions or muscle pain.

Carson traces the field to a long tradition of African Americans washing clothes in private homes during slavery and the Jim Crow era. “Laundry work, from its inception, has always been racialized labor associated with women of color,” she said.

“It takes so much time and energy to form a union,” said Luce. “Most of the time, we don’t see that work being put in such small places.” The diversity of retail laundry workers, she added, also requires organizers to speak a range of languages.

David Yu and his wife, Susan Guan, came from China to Brooklyn 20 years ago. Yu bought his first laundromat in 2005 in Greenpoint for $70,000, with the help of his parents and money he’d saved working in construction and restaurants here.

“On Mother’s Day, the children asked me, ‘Where’s mother?’ I said, ‘There’s no mother; mother is at work,’” Yu recalled.

Now Yu owns seven laundries around the city — all named after his wife — including a large 24-hour location in Flushing, Queens, whose 170 machines can return as much as $20,000 in gross monthly sales.

Although he complained that rising rents, competition and the increased minimum wage in New York are eroding his profits, Yu, who bought a house in Queens and has sent two of his children to college, has built a comfortable life here.

Rogers said it would possibly help if the department initiated more investigations of laundromats and dry cleaners, recalling how it did such a thing with nail salons. But a proactive stance like this, he added, would require the agency to partner with grassroots groups who could help organize the workers.

One of the Hot &amp; Crusty workers who’d emerged as a spokesman of the movement was López. He became an organizer with the Laundry Workers Center, eventually getting involved in the laundromat conundrum.

The survey found that 1 in 5 employees was paid below minimum wage, while 36% of them did not receive proper overtime compensation. Nearly a third surveyed claimed to have no sick or vacation days.

The study also pointed to what Yu said: It is the small, family-owned laundromats with one or two employees that are disproportionately more responsible for work violations than bigger stores.

Lin, 31, came here as a teenager with his family from China. “For most Chinese people here, it’s either restaurants or laundromats,” he said.

Despite her hours being cut, Perla, who came here from Mexico 12 years ago, said her work situation has improved.

Lin argued that he has always complied with safety standards. He also denied any accusation of abusive treatment outside of not paying his workers fairly.

Similar to what had happened to Perla at TYS, Ricarda saw her pay increase from around $7 to $13.50 an hour, but with her decreased weekly hours, she was making $164 less than what she used to.

Ricarda’s lawyer, Lina Stillman, estimates that she is owed close to $200,000. After a failed mediation, Ricarda and a co-worker filed a complaint. The case is ongoing.

$7 an Hour, 72 Hours a Week: Why Laundry Workers Have Had Enough

<h1>In 2012, Safieh fled Syria with her four children after their house was bombed. </h1>

Since then, Safieh, who had been an elementary schoolteacher in Damascus, had been living with her mother outside of Cairo.

The money she’d saved from selling off her jewelry had run out, and she could find only part-time work. Safieh’s children were unable to attend Egyptian schools because of their immigration status.

In December 2016, as the family finally prepared to leave Egypt for the United States, Safieh signed a promissory note to repay a travel loan, offered by the International Organization for Migration on behalf of the State Department, which would cover their airline tickets.

“I was so happy I didn’t pay attention to how much they would charge me,” Safieh said in Arabic over the phone from Albany, New York, where she now lives. “I just wanted to leave.”

About seven months later, Safieh started getting notices in the mail about paying back the $5,356 loan.

“I almost had a heart attack,” she said.

For decades, the State Department has funded interest-free travel loans to refugees who, like Safieh, cannot afford the cost of relocating here. Six months after their arrival, borrowers are expected to start repaying the loans to one of nine private nonprofits, known as resettlement agencies, which are involved in helping refugees start their new lives here. When refugees make their travel plans, they are assigned one of these resettlement agencies through the International Organization for Migration, which administers the travel loans.

The average loan per person is $1,100, and that amount can quickly increase when considering a full family. Meanwhile the resettlement agencies, including World Relief, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the International Rescue Committee, all of which collect the travel loan payments but have nothing to do with granting them to begin with, retain up to 25 percent of the total payments.

According to the most recent data from the State Department, in 2017, refugees made over $66 million in loan repayments. Of that amount, a bit over $14 million went to the resettlement agencies.

Some advocates think that these agencies should not be taking money from those they are trying to help. The nonprofits involved claim that these fees go toward their administration costs and programming, all of which is focused on giving refugees long-term financial security.

After coming to Rochester, New York, from Kenya, Sadiya Omar, 52, is finally enjoying some stability. She immigrated in 2002 with her three children, following a decade of living in a Somali refugee camp. Her travel loan was more than $3,000. Repaying it became a four-year ordeal.

“I worked two low-paid jobs, seven days a week,” said Omar, whose monthly payments of $70 came on top of bills, rent, child-care costs and the money she wired to her parents back in Kenya.

Today, Omar’s children are almost done with college. She is now vice-president and co-founder of Refugees Helping Refugees, a Rochester-based nonprofit that, among other services, helps Western New York refugees renegotiate the terms of their loans with billing agencies.

“I spoke English before I came here, which is why I was able to get a job after two months,” she recalled. Omar said that those who have to learn the language often struggle to find work in time for their first repayment.

This is what happened to Baydaa Majeed. Her family had relocated from Baghdad to Brooklyn in late 2015. When the newcomers were asked to start repaying their loan of almost $5,800, they were all still unemployed.

“It was really stressful,” said Majeed, a college graduate who, because of the language barrier, had failed to land even entry-level positions in retail.

The Majeeds were granted a three-month deferral of payments, but when the bills started coming again at the end of that period, Majeed and her relatives still hadn’t found work. Eventually, the family heard of an initiative by the Arab-American Family Support Center, a New York-based nonprofit, which would ultimately settle their debt.

Rawaa Nancy Albilal, president and chief executive of the Support Center, said that travel loans put refugee families under incommensurable stress. She questions whether resettlement agencies should be taking a commission on repayments, as the practice, she said, “defeats the purpose of their mission.”

Eskinder Negash, president and chief executive of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the agency assigned to collect payments from both Safieh and the Majeeds, argues that the fee is fair; if the State Department requires refugees to pay back their loans, his nonprofit should be allowed to recoup its costs, which include paying three full-time employees who coordinate the repayments.

“The question is whether we should charge refugees for their transportation to begin with,” Negash said.

According to a spokeswoman for the State Department, which, it must be said, takes a loss in the travel loan transactions, having refugees pay for their travel expenses helps defray resettlement costs and can strengthen the newcomers’ resolve for a successful migration.

The department maintains that the loans are designed to encourage repayments without placing undue hardship on refugees, as interest-free deferments and reduced monthly payments are easily granted to struggling debtors. In the process, newcomers are given an opportunity to become financially literate and build up their credit history.

The opposite is also true, however, as missed payments can affect credit scores.

To date, slightly over 18 percent of all the loans issued to refugees in 2016 did not receive a single payment, according to data from the State Department. These missed payments were reported to credit agencies. For a while, Safieh, who ultimately found a part-time job as an Arabic teacher, was nearly $800 behind on loan payments. She still needs to repay over $3,500.

“When you don’t have much, it’s hard to pay for anything,” Safieh said. “Frankly, I don’t know what to do.”

Welcome, refugees Now pay back your travel loans

A few years ago, when Rana Safieh learned that the United States had given her family refugee status, she was overjoyed.

Welcome, refugees. Now pay back your travel loans

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Fabrice Robinet

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Laundry Workers Are Fighting Back

$7 an Hour, 72 Hours a Week: Why Laundry Workers Have Had Enough

Welcome, refugees. Now pay back your travel loans