Building workers reach contract deal

Seventy minutes after their contract expired, Local 32BJ, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) union leaders announced a resolution in their talks with the Realty Advisory Board (RAB), keeping the 28,000 New York City apartment workers on the job.
The deal – an average two percent wage increase over four years – would not go into effect for the first six months, a compromise with the RAB’s call for a first-year wage freeze.
The workers – including 4,000 workers at 700 buildings in Queens – won out on the issue of healthcare charges, however, and they will not pay any part of their health insurance premiums. The RAB had called for the union workers to pay 15 percent of those costs.
One million tenants citywide could have been affected by a strike.
Negotiations between the union and the Realty Advisory Board (RAB), which represents most building owners in the city, began last month, but both sides said that they were far from reaching an agreement in the days leading up to the deadline.
Union members had not gone on strike since 1996, when 30,000 Manhattan office-building workers walked out. In 1991, residential doormen, handymen, concierges, and porters struck for 12 days. At a standing-room only meeting last month, 581 apartment building workers voted unanimously for the strike.
“Nobody wants to strike, but we need a living wage increase,” said Venus Rigueira, a Local 32BJ member who has worked as a “doorwoman” at a building in Woodside for 18 years. “People forget that we have the same bills as everyone else.”
Although Rigueira’s daughter is of age – no longer falling under her mother’s health care – Rigueira said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield covered most of her asthma medications.
“Now they want to double the co-pay and eliminate the dental,” she said, adding that the RAB has threatened to eliminate sick days and holiday pay.
Rigueira said that shareholders living in the Co-op where she works her building have empathized with the workers’ situation. During a strike in the 1980s, they brought out cookies and juice to picketers.
“That was really tough though … you can’t make that money up,” she said.