NYC Bosses Demand Givebacks - These Essential Workers Vow to Strike
Time is quickly running out for NYC commercial building owners to avert a strike with 32BJ cleaners. Photos and video by Steve Wishnia
By Steve Wishnia
“We have had four bargaining sessions and made no progress,” 32BJ SEIU president Manny Pastreich told a sea of purple wool hats and yellow banners and signs that filled half of Sixth Ave. for several blocks south of West 50th Street on Dec. 20. “Time is running short for them to make a deal.”
A few minutes later, as dusk lowered, Pastreich returned to the stage, between a large purple video screen declaring “READY TO STRIKE!” and the red, gold, and blue lights of the Radio City marquee. The union estimated the rally at 10,000 people.
“I need a motion to authorize the bargaining committee to reach a tentative agreement or call a strike,” he called out. “All in favor say yes!” The crowd roared back, chanting “Strike! Strike! Strike!” in Waiting for Lefty cadence.
The contract covering the 20,000 32BJ members who clean 1,300 commercial buildings in New York City expires Dec. 31. The Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations (RAB), the trade group representing the main building owners, has been intransigent, Pastreich told Work-Bites after the rally.
“On every single major issue, they have not moved an inch,” he says, referring to the union’s demands for wage increases, preserving the current system of 100% employer-paid family health care, and improved pension benefits. Instead, at the second bargaining session, the RAB demanded several givebacks, including a two-tier system, in which people hired in the future would get lower wages and benefits, and having workers pay part of their health-care premiums.
“That’s moving backwards from what we have today,” Pastreich says. A two-tier system, he told the crowd earlier, “would make it impossible for new workers to make a fair living.”
The contract covering the 20,000 32BJ members who clean 1,300 commercial buildings in New York City expires Dec. 31.
“I don’t want to go on strike. But I will go on strike, because they want to steal our benefits,” Danuta Klimas of Queens, a Polish immigrant who’s been a night-shift cleaner at 40 Worth St. for almost 29 years, told Work-Bites.
Health care is a personal issue for her. After the 9/11 attacks, she recalls, she and others who worked in buildings near the ruins cleaned them without having masks to protect themselves from the toxic dust, using vacuum cleaners without HEPA filters to remove particulates from the air. Years later, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“I’m very lucky I was able to get through surgery because I have our employer-paid health insurance,” Klimas says. She’s been cancer-free for eight years now, she adds, and “you cannot put a price tag on that.”
When the COVID emergency was declared in 2020, she and her coworkers were back on the job eight days later, putting in extended duties.
“They cannot ask us for such a sacrifice,” she says of the health-care givebacks. “We want to buy groceries. We have pennies compared to them. That’s why we are saying ‘hell no!’”
The union’s other top priorities are extending recall rights from six months to one year and “sign one, sign all.” Recall rights, which were temporarily extended to two years during COVID, means when workers get laid off, they retain all seniority rights if you get your job back within that period. “Sign one, sign all” means that if the owners or contractors sign an agreement with 32BJ in New York City, they agree to labor peace — not interfering with union organizing — anywhere the Service Employees International Union has a presence. The union says this has been extremely important for organizing new members, particularly in New Jersey.
“They called us ‘essential workers’ during the pandemic…and now that we did our jobs, they’re telling us at the bargaining table that we are disposable.”
“We are talking about 20,000 working families’ livelihoods at stake,” Godwin Dillon, a strike captain at 85 Broad St., told the crowd. “More of us could be forced to move out of the city. More of us would have to choose between our health and paying rent. More of us could be forced to take second jobs. The RAB talks about their trillions of dollars — while we’re talking about how we’re going to pay our bills.”
Several elected officials and other union leaders turned out to show solidarity. They included Sen. Charles Schumer, Mayor Eric Adams; city Comptroller Brad Lander; New York City Central Labor Council President Vincent Alvarez; United Auto Workers Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla; and SEIU leaders from around the country, among them Olga Miranda, president of San Francisco’s Local 87, which represents building-services workers there.
Despite the seriousness of the issues, the rally also had a party atmosphere, with a band playing late-’70s disco and R&B songs. SEIU executive vice president Rocio Sáenz, head of the union’s property-services division, led a chant of “when we fight, we win,” over the bass-and-drums groove of the 1960s soul classic “Stand By Me.”
The union is now in “the homestretch of the contract fight,” Denis Johnston, head of 32BJ’s commercial division, told the crowd. “They called us ‘essential workers’ during the pandemic…and now that we did our jobs, they’re telling us at the bargaining table that we are disposable.”
The city would not have recovered from the pandemic without the cleaners’ work, says Pastreich, and “they deserve to be able to afford to live in the city. These are the biggest building owners in the world. We’re not going to rebuild the city on the backs of people making $29 an hour.”
The rally, he told Work-Bites, “showed that we’re 10,000 strong.” But with five bargaining sessions remaining before the contract expires Dec. 31, he adds, “we’re so far apart.”