Can Laundry And Lettuce Save Cleaveland?

A worker-owned co-op that even a capitalist could love is washing linens for the cleveland clinic and growing vegetables for the city.

- Daniel Mcgraw

About 40,000 pounds of laundry from hospitals and nursing homes—bed sheets, towels, surgical scrubs, bibs, and lab coats—arrive by truck daily at a massive building just east of Cleveland. Literal blood, sweat, and tears must be removed, and the items must be sent back, fresh and clean and folded, by the next day.

The interior of the laundry facility is about the size of a football field. Laundry is processed in 220-pound bags. The dirty clothes and linens spend 90 seconds in one washer, then 90 seconds in another; bleach and purifying chemicals are added in a third. Items go through two drying machines before they’re pressed and folded, sealed in plastic, and shipped out.

This same process happens every night in every city in the world. Human fluids and other unmentionables that come with hospital life need to be dealt with so patients don’t get sicker. The work doesn’t pay a lot, and it definitely is not glamorous— but it’s both necessary and necessarily local, given the fast turnaround that’s needed.

Such facilities tend for obvious reasons to employ low-skilled individuals. Yet here, the economic arrangement differs from the norm. This laundry is being cleaned by Evergreen Cooperatives, a company owned in part by the people who work there. When stuff gets done more efficiently and profits go up, those with an ownership stake get bonuses at the end of the year.