Laundry, Dry Cleaning Workers & Allied Industries Retirement Fund

Laundry, Dry Cleaning Workers & Allied Industries Retirement Fund

The Laundry, Dry Cleaning Workers & Allied Industries Retirement Fund is a multi-employer Taft-Hartley pension plan established to provide defined-benefit retirement income to workers in the laundry, dry cleaning, and allied industries. Affiliated with Workers United — the union formed in 2009 through the merger of UNITE HERE's apparel division and the Service Employees International Union — the fund operates as a pooled arrangement where multiple contributing employers across the fragmented laundry sector fund a single trust. Its known mailing address places it alongside union operations at 333 Westchester Avenue in White Plains, New York. The fund's investment strategy reflects the traditional posture of a union pension: a diversified institutional portfolio spread across public equities, fixed income, and a significant allocation to alternative assets. The strategy list attributed to the fund touches virtually every category — buyout, venture capital, growth equity, mezzanine, distressed debt, secondaries, special situations, and fund-of-funds — indicating a broad commitment to private-market exposure through external managers and, less frequently, direct co-investments. The fund's alternative portfolio is built through longstanding relationships with general partners, typical of Taft-Hartley plans that prioritize steady returns over rapid growth. No specific portfolio companies have been publicly identified. The fund reported $104.72 million in assets as of its 2008 Form 5500 filing, covering more than 12,000 participants across the United States (per IRS Form 5500, 2009). The participant base spans a workforce concentrated in New York, the Mid-Atlantic, and pockets of the Midwest where unionized laundry and linen-supply operations remain active. Workers United provides the collective bargaining framework through which contributing employers remit to the plan, while a board of trustees — split evenly between labor and management representatives — governs investment policy, benefit levels, and actuarial assumptions. What distinguishes this fund structurally is not its size but its sector concentration. The laundry and dry cleaning industry has undergone decades of consolidation and non-union competition, placing secular pressure on the contributing employer base. As a mature, declining-coverage Taft-Hartley plan, the fund must balance the actuarial needs of an aging participant pool against a smaller and possibly shrinking contribution stream — an architecture that makes asset allocation and manager selection existential rather than opportunistic.