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As office owners struggle, union janitors prepare to strike

Intense negotiations expected with contract expiring next month

City’s Commercial Janitors Preparing to Strike

(Photo Illustration by The Real Deal with Getty)

Show business and auto worker strikes took center stage in the national consciousness this year. But New York City building owners are more focused on commercial janitorial workers, whose union contract expires at year’s end.

With office landlords hurting, negotiations figure to be rough, New York Magazine reported.

Collective bargaining between the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union begins next week. The expiring, four-year contract covers about 20,000 office janitors and commercial cleaners.

Wages and health benefits will play prominently into the labor fight. The union, whose cleaners pay zero percent of their health insurance premiums, told the publication that property owners may seek concessions because so much office space is vacant or underused.

Owners don’t deny that.

“Unfortunately, the commercial real estate industry is currently facing significant challenges,” said Howard Rothschild, president of the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, in a statement to The Real Deal. “We must work with the union to bridge the gap and reach a fair and reasonable contract.”

The headcount of commercial cleaners has dwindled by about 2,000 since the start of the pandemic. Around 45 building workers died in Covid’s early days.

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Simon Davis-Cohen, a union spokesperson, said many of those still employed have taken on more work because they have fewer colleagues and more arduous sanitation protocols to follow.

“We’re anticipating this to be a hard bargain,” Davis-Cohen told New York’s Errol Louis. “We’re really preparing for a strike in a way that this workforce hasn’t prepared in a while.”

New York’s commercial building workers haven’t struck since 1996. That walkout lasted a month, forcing landlords to clean toilets and ask tenants to process their wastebaskets and dust their desks.

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In March, a labor fight between building service workers and owners in the Bronx nearly led to a 2,000-person strike. The Bronx Realty Advisory Board and 32BJ agreed to a contract at the 11th hour, averting the first ever strike of the Bronx unit.

A year ago, 32BJ and the Realty Advisory Board feuded over the labor fate of 32,000 residential building workers. They ultimately agreed to a 12.6 percent wage increase over four years and dodged the first strike for those workers in 30 years.

— Holden Walter-Warner

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32BJ SEIULabor UnionsRealty Advisory Board On Labor Relations