LEBANON — State and local welfare agencies began organizing assistance efforts for the approximately 100 workers who lost their jobs last week with the abrupt closing of Kleen Inc.’s commercial laundry plant as the owners of the property began to consider what to do with the 3½-acre parcel in the heart of Lebanon.
And a nearby commercial cleaner also welcomed dozens of them to a mini job fair just days after they learned of being laid off.
“I’m hoping UniFirst will let me in,” said Scott Rhoades, a second-shift supervisor who at noon on Friday was helping to close down the Foundry Street cleaning plant as workers wrapped up their last shift. The Lebanon uniform cleaning company UniFirst was one of three employers, along with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and General Linen Service in Somersworth, N.H., who showed up at Kleen on Thursday to meet employees and talk about jobs at their companies.
Kleen, which provided laundry service to about 20 hospitals in New Hampshire and Vermont, shut down on Friday, leaving many plant workers with troubled pasts — and for whom the company was a lifeline — searching for jobs at a time of record-low unemployment in the Upper Valley.
Rhoades joined Kleen five years ago as a “general laborer” and worked his way up to a supervisor’s position, overseeing a dozen workers in the plant’s first-floor washing department. He was making $15 an hour as a supervisor, and his wife, Heather, also worked for Kleen. The 35-year-old Rhoades said he did well at his a job at Kleen but is worried that a criminal record from his youth before he straightened out his life will count against him, leaving the father of four and Claremont resident with few options.
“I’m a five-time felon. But I walked through the door and they gave me shot,” said Rhoades, adding, “When I was young I didn’t care what was going on” which led to multiple stints behind bars. But Kleen was one of the few employers in the Upper Valley who were willing to hire people considered too high-risk — as long as they were willing to work and obey the rules.
Those five years at Kleen, Rhoades said, “definitely got me a foot into a better life.”
New Hampshire Employment Security, the state agency in charge of administering unemployment compensation and helping displaced workers with finding new jobs, will send a “rapid response” team to Kleen’s Foundry Street plant to meet with former employees when they return to pick up their last paychecks on Wednesday, said Michael Power, who heads the state program that coordinates with area agencies in assistance efforts.
Power said there will be representatives on hand to connect Kleen workers with job retraining programs — federally funded financial assistance is available to pay for it — as well as the manager from the Claremont office of New Hampshire Employment Security to answer questions about filing for unemployment compensation and guide laid-off workers through the process.
“We first heard there was an issue with Kleen a couple weeks ago” when the company closed its retail dry cleaning stores and let go of 10 employees, Powers said. “Then it got more serious” as Kleen took the next step and shut down its commercial laundry operation, which accounted for more than 90% of the cleaner’s business and the vast bulk of its employees.
Powers said he expects Wednesday’s meeting between Kleen’s laid-off workers and the rapid response team will last up to 90 minutes, and team members will be available to meet with employees privately “so they can ask the real questions.”
“We’re here to say ‘this isn’t your fault’ and to get them back on the horse,” he said.
Already by Thursday UniFirst and DHMC had dispatched people to meet with Kleen workers at the Foundry Street plant about open jobs.
Philip Breen, general manager of the UniFirst plant on Etna Road in Lebanon, said about 50 Kleen workers — half the company’s workforce — showed up at the “mini job fair” to learn about “general production positions” open at the industrial laundry processing facility.
“We had several people apply and already have interviews scheduled over the next couple of days,” Breen said via email, declining to say how much the jobs paid. He described them as “competitive” and that they come with “a comprehensive benefits package.”
Asked whether a prison record would disqualify an applicant from employment at the company, Breen said, “UniFirst is an equal opportunity employer.”
(One thing former Kleen workers could look forward to at UniFirst would be the security of joining a financially stable company: The 14,000-employee, Massachusetts-based UniFirst reported revenue increased 5.3% to $1.3 billion and profit increased 4% to $133 million for the nine-month period ended May 25).
Lebanon city administrators heard no official word about the Kleen plant shutting down and the fate of workers until last Tuesday, nearly 24 hours after company management called a meeting on Monday afternoon on the plant floor to inform workers that it could not operate profitably unless its hospital customers were willing to pay more for the cleaning of their linens.
In fact, the city’s human services director, Lynne Goodwin, said she heard nothing about the closing until a landlord whose tenants include Kleen employees contacted Goodwin to tell her the news.
Goodwin alerted Paula Maville, Lebanon’s deputy city manager, who later that afternoon was able to confirm with Kleen that the company was shutting down and laying off all its employees within four days.
Lebanon officials are now working to identify Kleen employees who live in the city in case they need help applying for unemployment benefits. Maville said the initial estimate is that 20 to 30 Kleen employees live in Lebanon.
Another large group of employees, perhaps as many as 30, reside in Claremont, according to Lebanon officials.
The city also provides, as required by all municipalities under New Hampshire law, financial assistance for rent and utilities to qualified displaced workers who are at risk of eviction from their housing because of financial hardship. To be eligible for the assistance, individuals need to have exhausted their earnings, received a delinquency notice on their rent and utilities and actively be looking for employment, Goodwin said.
Goodwin said Kleen’s is the largest layoff affecting low-wage workers in the six years she’s led the city’s human resources department.
“We’ve had some tech companies that had more (layoffs), but those jobs pay more,” she said.
“A big concern of mine is the difficulty a lot of these folks are going to have transferring to another job,” she said, given how many lack job skills and how some were “rough around the edges, which presents challenges to co-workers and management.”
But Kleen, Goodwin said, “was always willing to work with that.”
As for what happens to the 3.5-acre Kleen property on the bank of the Mascoma River flowing through downtown Lebanon, which includes a 119-year-old, 59,000-square-foot brick-and-clapboard laundry plant and 14,000-square-foot office structure, no decisions have been made, according to Greg Gosselin, whose family owns the property and leases it to Kleen.
Selling the property to a developer is one likely outcome, he said, and it even until recently had been on the market.
Assessed at $1.3 million, the property is owned 50% by Gosselin’s uncle, James Gosselin, and 50% by Thomas K. Gosselin Family Trust. The family also owns 25 Mechanic St., a 5,000-square-foot building where the dry cleaning plant and retail outlet was located, which is assessed at $358,000.
“We had it for sale for quite a while,” Gosselin said, noting that the former laundromat building located at 49 Mechanic St. was sold last year to a California investor. “Last summer we had a number of developers looking at it, but with the uncertainty of the tenant they were not interested,” he said, so the family did not renew the for-sale listing with Lang McLaughry Commercial Real Estate.
“We are hoping there maybe will be renewed interest now that the tenant situation has more clarity. … The idea would be to rehab the property similar to the Rivermill complex (next to Kleen on Mechanic Street) or the Sugar River Mills apartments in Claremont,” said Gosselin, who remained as president of Kleen until 2013, even after his family had sold the company — but not the real estate — several years earlier.
Gosselin, who had been in various legal battles with the current tenants over the years, including an attempt to evict them in 2016 over unpaid back rent, said Kleen has been leasing the property for $16,000 per month. The company is current on lease payments now, but Gosselin said the business’s owners have informed him that they plan to occupy the premises for only a couple more months.
Founded in 1897 as Lebanon Steam Laundry, a home laundry service, the business was bought by Joe Gosselin in 1928, who then expanded into dry cleaning as that technology was becoming widespread in the first half of the 20th century. The Gosselin family grew the business by merging with other dry cleaning services in the Upper Valley and in the early 1970s took a big leap after landing the laundry contract for Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, predecessor to DHMC.
But after 78 years and four generations of ownership, the Gosselin family sold control of Kleen in 2006 to a Massachusetts businessman, who six years later merged it with Manchester-based commercial cleaner Envoy Services, whose principals, Dennis Kim and Ned Hazard, have operated the company ever since.
Kleen workers said Kleen’s fortunes took a decided turn for the worse when the company lost its DHMC contract in 2009 to a Massachusetts cleaner (DHMC now contracts with the Quebec company Medique).
“That was 20% to 25% of the business,” said Mahlon Wilson, who spent 14 years driving a tractor-trailer truck to make nightly deliveries to the cleaner’s hospital customers across New England.
Wilson, standing by himself on the first floor of Kleen’s plant on Friday afternoon which had already begun to feel like a ghost town after the last shift of workers had cleared out a couple hours earlier, said he never understood the logic of that decision.
“We’re 15 minutes from DHMC, and we could run anything they needed in an emergency over there and they went with a cleaner in Massachusetts?” he asked rhetorically, shaking his head.
The brief notice that Kleen management gave employees that the plant was closing and they’d be out of jobs within days had some wondering if the company had followed federal and state laws that require companies with 100 employees or more to give 60 days’ advance notice to the state of plant closings and “mass layoffs.”
Danielle Albert, an attorney with the New Hampshire Department of Labor who handles the layoff notice process with companies in the state, said that there are various exemptions from the requirement, however, one of them being if the enterprise in question is a “faltering company” that was “actively seeking” capital but unable to secure funding to continue operating.
After consulting with Kleen, she said, the labor department assessed that Kleen met the threshold of “faltering company” and a waiver to the 60-day notice rule was granted.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
