Tentative contract deal holds off strike by New York City apartment building workers

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NEW YORK (AP) — Union leaders representing thousands of New York City apartment house doorpersons, superintendents and other workers said Friday that they had reached a tentative contract agreement with building owners, averting a strike at the homes of an estimated 1.5 million people.

The deal came just days before nearly 34,000 workers’ contract with an array of private building owners would have expired at midnight Monday. A strike would have been the first in 35 years, and some apartment-dwellers across the city had been bracing to haul trash, postpone renovations and major deliveries and volunteer to staff lobby doors, sort packages and mop hallways.

“Our goals were simple: to raise the wage to a level that our members can live in this city,” to protect health benefits and to improve pensions, union President Manny Pastreich said at a news conference. He called the proposed contract “an incredibly good deal for both sides.”

Workers will vote by May 28 on the tentative agreement, which includes pay raises and a 15% pension boost. Average annual wages for a doorperson or porter, for example, would rise from about $62,000 now to $71,000 in four years, and a new training program would offer future hires a faster route up the wage scale.

Building owners also retreated from proposals to have employees start paying health insurance premiums and to create a new job classification for future hires. The union said the newcomers would be lower-paid.

At the same time, the tentative deal gives building owners a break on some payments into a health fund that has built up a reserve, said Howard Rothschild, the president of the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, which represents the owners.

“Ultimately, both sides thought carefully about the current economic situation and how to make contract improvements that we can all agree with,” Rothschild said at the news conference.

Negotiations had grown tense in recent days, and thousands of union members thronged Manhattan's ritzy Park Avenue on Wednesday to authorize a strike if a deal wasn't reached. The rally drew Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other New York Democratic officials.

The union said then that members were straining to pay New York-area bills, while employers have reaped sharply rising rents for market-rate apartments in buildings that the workers maintain, safeguard and make welcoming.

The Realty Advisory Board said the union was being unrealistic at a time when owners’ costs also are rising and landlords face a potential rent freeze on 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, an idea championed by Mamdani.

The union’s last strike, in 1991, lasted 12 days.