LABOR: Harmony in the Wash

William Joseph Donovan never got past the second grade in school. He bummed around his native Chicago for a while, finally got work as a wagon boy for an express company. At 15 he became an organizer for a tough Chicago teamsters’ union. That year (1905) the teamsters put on one of the bloodiest general strikes in Chicago’s history. Bill Donovan came out of it a proven labor organizer.

For twelve years he worked at union organizing, quit to go into the teaming business for himself, sold out, weaved in & out of union work with occasional side ventures such as running a nightclub, working in three Chicago laundries. Three years ago a lawyer named Benjamin E. Cohen, attorney for a bankrupt Chicago laundry workers’ union, asked Donovan why he didn’t organize the city’s 18,000 laundry workers. Bill went back to his first love with such vigor that within a few months his local (No. 46) had a signed contract with the 137 members of the Chicago Laundry Owners Association, which does 85% of Chicago’s home laundry for some $29,000,000 a year.

Now 50, grey-haired, big-eared, balding Bill Donovan is a tough, free-swearing, ungrammatical labor leader in store clothes. When he thinks an argument has gone far enough, he closes it for keeps with the snapper: “And them are the facts! What the hell?” His prosperous Local 46 has around 15,000 members, over $90,000 in the till, closed-shop contracts with all but two of Chicago’s 960 laundries. Some 90% of its members are women, about one-third are Negroes. In three years Bill Donovan has doubled their hourly wages. In that time there have been no jurisdictional fights, a few inconsequential strikes. For his work Laborman Donovan draws $200 a week, plus expenses. He is proud of his expense account because it means “I never even took a cigar off a laundry owner.”

But the owners did not prosper so well. A few months ago Donovan was discussing Chicago’s blighted laundry business with shrewd, hulking President James Shaw of the Laundry Owners Association. Donovan suggested an advertising cam paign, said his union was ready to put up $10,000, that he thought the laundry truck drivers’ union would do the same. Laundryman Shaw was sold, but it took him three months to get the other owners to agree. Finally they put up $32,000. Last week the campaign, scheduled for mid-September in local newspapers, was in the hands of an advertising agency. Its tentative theme song: “Home is no place to do the laundry.”

One thing Bill Donovan hopes will come out of his liaison with the owners is the severance of his local from all lawyers. He hates lawyers, bridles at the $1,000 worth of union dues Ben Cohen’s monthly retainer eats up. Says he: “We wanna be friendly. We wanna do business without lawyers.”

Last week C. I. O. and A. F. of L. officers, many of whom still view such advanced forms of “class collaboration” with alarm, could recall no prior case in which a labor union contributed to an industry’s advertising campaign.