On Wednesday afternoon, thousands of doormen, porters, superintendents, and handypersons packed Park Avenue on the Upper East Side and held up signs reading “Yes.” The message was unmistakable. Members of 32BJ Service Employees International Union approved a strike authorization by voice vote, if contract negotiations fail to yield a new agreement. The clock is now running.
Some 1.5 million New York City residents would be impacted if the strike actually goes forward Monday — the last such strike was in 1991, more than three decades ago. That walkout lasted 12 days. This time, with a city already stretched by cost-of-living pressures on both sides of the negotiating table, the stakes may be higher.
What Is at Stake
The workers serve some 600,000 co-ops, apartments, and condos in 3,500 buildings across the boroughs except the Bronx. A strike would leave an estimated 1.5 million residents to mind their own doors, take out their own trash, accept package deliveries, and otherwise tend to their own building needs.
Beyond the daily inconvenience, co-op and condo boards, landlords, and other building owners would have to make alternative arrangements for garbage removal, package deliveries, building security, and numerous other operations. Residents would need to wear badges to enter buildings, non-emergency renovation work would stop, and moving in or out of buildings would halt.
The vote comes days before the current four-year labor agreement expires on April 20. The contract covers about 34,000 residential building workers, including doorpersons, porters, superintendents, handypersons, and resident managers.
The Contract Dispute, Explained
The core of the disagreement comes down to three issues: wages, healthcare, and the structure of the workforce going forward.
The union is seeking to maintain employer-paid health care, secure wage increases to keep pace with the cost of living, strengthen pension benefits, and improve working conditions. Meanwhile, 32BJ SEIU has criticized proposals from the RAB that would require workers to contribute to health care premiums, create a lower-paid tier for future hires, expand the use of temporary workers, and weaken contract enforcement.
The RAB estimates that the average doorman or porter under the union contract earns approximately $62,000 annually. With the cost of health insurance and other benefits included, that compensation equates to $112,000, according to the board. The RAB frames healthcare cost-sharing as a matter of long-term industry sustainability. The union frames the same demand as a rollback of protections that workers have held for years.
RAB argued in a recent statement that 32BJ members are part of only 5% of U.S. employees that do not contribute anything for family healthcare premiums. Union leadership fired back directly. “Our members are the essential workers the residential real estate industry and this city rely on in snowstorms, throughout COVID, and every day. The RAB’s proposals to cut costs on the backs of its essential workers are insulting,” said 32BJ SEIU President Manny Pastreich.
Union leaders argue that the board’s contract proposals won’t help workers keep up with the city’s cost of living. “What we have in front of us is that we’re coming off four of the highest years of inflation,” Pastreich said. “Our members are struggling to pay rent to live in the city, to pay for the groceries — we see the cost of transportation going up every single day.”
City Hall Takes a Side
Wednesday’s rally on Park Avenue was not just a union gathering. It was a public alignment by some of the city’s most prominent elected officials.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, City Comptroller Mark Levine, and New York City Central Labor Council President Brendan Griffith all appeared at the rally in support of the workers. Mamdani did not hedge. “Under our administration, New York is, and always will be, a union town,” Mamdani said. “We are sending a clear message to every building owner that the hardworking members of 32BJ will not be pushed around by anyone.”
City Council Speaker Julie Menin added, “We are in this fight with you. We will not rest until all of the workers here, all of the members of 32BJ get the pay and the healthcare you deserve.”
The optics carry weight beyond the immediate dispute. The RAB has signaled, indirectly, that Mamdani’s broader fiscal agenda — particularly a proposed rent freeze on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments — is complicating its ability to commit to wage increases. RAB President Howard Rothschild said, “The likelihood of zero percent rent increases across nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City for years during the entire life of this contract will significantly limit the industry’s ability to support wage growth.”
That framing puts the labor dispute squarely inside a larger battle over how New York’s housing economy distributes its gains — and who absorbs its costs.
What Happens Next
Negotiations are ongoing ahead of the April 20 deadline. Labor leaders said they will return to the negotiating table Thursday. Both sides have reason to resolve this without a walkout. The 1991 strike disrupted daily life across the city for nearly two weeks and settled with a wage increase — a result that, in retrospect, both sides could have reached at the bargaining table.
The RAB responded to the union’s demands in a statement Wednesday, citing “mounting pressures” on the real estate industry. “Without meaningful movement to address cost,” the statement read, “the long-term sustainability of the industry and its workforce is at risk.”
Whether that movement comes before Monday morning will determine whether 1.5 million New Yorkers spend next week opening their own doors.
