NEW YORK – Thousands of New York City apartment building doorpersons, superintendents and other workers voted to authorize a potential strike Wednesday after contract negotiations snagged over issues including health care and pensions.
A strike would be the first in 35 years and would affect 1.5 million renters, co-op owners and condo dwellers across the city, according to the workers' union, called 32BJ SEIU. Residents could have to take on such tasks as staffing doors, sorting packages, mopping hallways, sweeping sidewalks and hauling trash to the curb.
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If no deal is reached, a strike could start as soon as midnight Monday, when the current contract expires.
The union says building owners are trying to squeeze 34,000 workers who already strive to afford the pricey metro area on salaries that average about $62,000 a year for doorpersons. Averages vary for other jobs.
Building owners, represented by an umbrella group called the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, say they are facing financial pressures themselves. They want the workers to start paying health insurance premiums and want new hires to come in under a new job classification that the union says would be lower-paying.
At a rally that stretched for more than four blocks along Manhattan's Park Avenue on Wednesday, thousands of workers held up cards that said “YES I am ready to strike” as some of their colleagues looked on from their posts at doorways on the tony boulevard.
Adam Cintron, a doorperson at a building elsewhere in Manhattan, was hoping a deal would avert a strike. But he is concerned about keeping up with the cost of living.
“I love my job," Cintron said as he attended the rally with his rescue dog, Jett, whom a dog-loving resident of the building helped him find. To Cintron, that is an indication of residents' regard for the staffers who work to ensure their home runs smoothly.
“We try to take care of everyone,” said Cintron, 39.
While battling owners’ health care and new-hires proposals, the union is pushing to increase pensions and increase wages, although it has yet to make an exact proposal on pay. Union President Manny Pastreich emphasized that workers face rising costs, including rents — a source of income for “the very same building owners who say they have to come after our health care to make ends meet.”
The Realty Advisory Board says building owners also face rising expenses — and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to freeze rent on the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. Mamdani, a Democrat, joined the building workers' rally Wednesday, saluting “those who maintain multimillion-dollar apartments, and yet, when they get home, struggle to understand how they can make rent on the first of the month.”
Realty board President Howard Rothschild, meanwhile, called for negotiating a contract that “supports a viable path forward.”
“Without meaningful movement to address costs ... the long-term sustainability of the industry and its workforce is at risk," Rothschild said in a statement.
Building owners note that few U.S. workers enjoy family health benefits without paying premiums.
But to workers such as Percy Jackson, a porter in Brooklyn's East New York neighborhood, the benefits make his job of 23 years viable.
“With everything going up in New York ... if we had to pay, actually, into our medical, it wouldn't work," said Jackson, whose position entails cleaning, dealing with trash and more.
Being a doorperson — many New Yorkers call the mostly male workers “doormen” — might conjure a white-gloved fellow ceremoniously opening an ornate entrance. But the job often involves other functions (and uniforms aren't always quite so formal).
Besides providing basic security in buildings that can have hundreds of residents, doorpersons field package and food deliveries that have mushroomed since the COVID-19 pandemic. They help people with strollers and walkers navigate lobby stairs. In some buildings, they might also handle cleaning, snow shoveling, and wrestling refuse bins out of basements and alleys for pickup.
Superintendents, meanwhile, oversee maintenance, repairs and day-to-day operations in buildings that may be a more than a century old.
Some building managers already have told residents they may need to postpone renovations, moves and major deliveries and minimize deliveries and visitors, among other steps, if there is a strike.
The union's last strike, in 1991, lasted 12 days. In the years since, the union has at times voted to authorize a strike but then reached contract deals.