Laundry worker, Charlotte, NC

Ana Calles has worked at Cintas’s Charlotte, North Carolina, plant for eight years. She toils long hours in the facility’s stockroom hoping to gain a better life for her daughter. Unfortunately, hard work doesn’t pay off at North America’s largest uniform provider. Throughout the United States, Cintas workers like Ana endure dangerous working conditions, low wages, skyrocketing health insurance premiums and discrimination. “We aren’t able to move up,” she says.

That’s why Ana and her coworkers are organizing a union. Forming a union is, according to Ana, ”the only way to have better pay, good health insurance and equality -- not discrimination” at Cintas. “I know that Cintas will never improve working conditions on its own free will.”

Cintas has met workers’ efforts with a campaign of coercion. “When we tried to organize, management told us that we could lose our jobs,” Ana explains. The company has disciplined -- even threatened to fire -- Ana and coworkers for standing up. A recent ruling from a National Labor Relations Board judge found several violations of Charlotte workers’ right to organize that were “not isolated or minor” and “intensive.”

The company’s harassment and intimidation has had a profound effect. “The workers are scared,” she says. “The NLRB has not been able to help much. In the case of Cintas in Charlotte, we’ve had to wait three years to get a decision.” Because Cintas is appealing, workers could have to wait years to get a final ruling.

Because of the slow and weak response of the NLRB to employers’ attacks on workers’ rights, Cintas employees like Ana and UNITE HERE are seeking a fair process -- like the one outlined in the Employee Free Choice Act. It would allow workers to democratically decide on forming a union. With a union, Ana believes all Cintas workers will get the respect they deserve.