Maintenance Men & Women March in Midtown; Union-Owners Reach Agreement
SATURDAY PM UPDATE: Commercial building owners and SEIU Local 32BJ reached agreement this afternoon. The contract will bring base pay for office cleaners to about $47,000 per year by the end of the 4-year term. Together with some overtime and some second-job work, a single parent family of three could manage on such earnings. Read SEIU 32BJ's contract summary here
You can read it in the morning papers, hear it on the radio, building service workers, members of SEIU Local 32BJ are threatening strikes as their contracts expire on New Year’s Day. The union, representing 26,000 NYC commercial building employees, and the NYC employers' association, the Realty Advisory Board, moved to the Sheraton (53rd & 7th Ave,) for the traditional down-to-the-wire talk fest. The commercial real estate market has been booming and the union wants more of the pie. In time-honored tradition of union struggles they held a rally Thursday and, between appointments, I stopped by.
The rally was huge and high spirited. I stopped counting at a 1,000 purple-hatted protesters. Updated at end, post jump. I talked to a bunch. Many were recent immigrants from China, Korea, Poland, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All were solidly union. One activist, anonymous, explained the union strategy was to divide and conquer. The union is facing strike deadlines all over the North East but, she said, she expected settlements in many cities so that – if NYC workers (26,000, the largest) had to go out – the union was prepared and would have resources for a long tough strike. Indeed, current reports bear her out: Building owners settled with Local 32BJ in New Jersey , Connecticut and DC-Baltimore-Md. .
NYC Council President Christine Quinn was the only local elected I saw there. (This seems a sign as to which way 32 BJ leadership is leaning in the 2009 Mayoral race.) She spoke, stayed for the whole rally and kissed every purple union hat in reach. Then (and this was the best part), the workers were told to go home – but completely fired up – they didn’t. They marched though midtown down 6th Ave. Traffic stopped, tourist stared, cops smiled, building security guys cheered as a huge impromptu group with signs, banners whistles and drums shouted "32! BJ!" I peeled off at 42nd Street but the marchers kept going. If you like that sort of thing (and I do) it was quite a sight.
Friday PM Update. A union press briefing reported no progress and described the issue between the sides as money pure and simple: (quote below via NY1),
Landlords and building owners are offering little more than a cost-of-living raise, saying the workers are already the highest paid in the country and that any discussions must take into account forecasts of an economic slowdown.
“It’s incredible to me that people make millions of dollars every year on these buildings, will talk about how much a porter, who makes less than $40,000 a year, that he’s high paid,†said Kevin Doyle of Local 32BJ. “Our members can’t afford to live in New York City at the wages that they make. They need a significant wage increase.â€
Neither side will reveal specifics, but workers now make an average of $40,500 plus benefits, which the real estate board says brings the yearly total to about $66,000.
Newsday's report of the same press briefing includes this:
"The union says the workers' wages don't reflect the booming value of the buildings where its 26,000 members work, mostly in Manhattan."
The union has taken out online ads in real estate trade journal to reach out to commercial owners directly. The arguement: because rents and building values have soared, the owners can afford to raise wages now.
32BJ's problem
The union is demanding raises that exceed the inflation rate, as measured by the federal government's Consumer Price Index. This is not unusual, and not just as a bargaining chip.
Over time, as productivity increases, wages tend to rise faster than inflation. The true cost of labor is most easily figured as the wage increase minus the productivity increase (purists will claim, rightly, that the actual math is somewhat more complex, but this will do for now). So if workers get a 5% raise, but their productivity rises by 3%, the actual cost of labor only rises by 2%.
How? Suppose a business has 100 employees at the beginning of a year. Over the course of the year, 5 of them leave. With a productivity increase of 3%, the employer only needs to hire 2 new workers, and the 97 remaining at the end of the year will be able to accomplish what it took 100 at the beginning of the year.
Looking at the entire American workforce, this sort of thing is happening all over the place. Over time, the result of raises that exceed the inflation rate is a higher standard of living. (N.B.: Since 2001, wages for most Americans have failed to keep pace with inflation, while productivity gains have been quite good; the result has been ridiculous profits for many businesses -- and even more ridiculous salary packages for CEOs.)
So why don't the building owners want to give 32BJ workers a raise that exceeds the inflation rate?
The answer lies in the specifics of the jobs that 32BJ workers do. These jobs are heavily labor-intensive, and not subject to the kinds of technological advances that increase productivity. In other words, if it takes 30 workers to get the job done this year, it will probably take 30 workers next year, and again the year after. Giving these workers a raise that exceeds the inflation rate will mean a total labor cost that rises "too fast" for the owners to handle.
In other labor-intensive industries, such as the theatre, the solution has been to use fewer workers -- in this case, actors. As a result, while a typical Broadway play might have had a cast of 20 or more actors back in 1930, today's Broadway plays (nonmusicals) typically have a cast of only four or five. Such a solution is not available to building owners.
So the question is whether to cause the people who keep our commercial buildings clean and running to fall behind the rest of us because they happen to be in a labor-intensive industry, let them keep up and pay higher commercial rents, or find other ways to make up the cost difference.
Meanwhile, building owners are trying to hold the line on this cost.
One more note: According to the local's president, Mike Fishman, their workers haven't even gotten cost-of-living raises over the past several years, and he's just trying to make up for lost time. Interesting.
I am reminded, I don't know why, of Samuel Gompers remark:
"What Does Labor Want? — More!
"Labor wants the earth and the fullness thereof. There is nothing too precious, there is nothing too beautiful, too lofty, too ennobling which is in the scope and comprehension of labor's aspirations.
“We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright. These in brief are the primary demands made by the Trade Unions in the name of labor. These are the demands made by labor upon modern society and in their consideration is involved the fate of civilization.â€
Samuel Gompers, President of American Federation of Labor 1886-1924 (I think the quote 9is from 1883).