Manhattan Doormen Edge Toward First Strike in 30 Years as Pay Talks Stall

As New York’s apartment building workers threaten to strike, the city faces a test of labour relations in an industry at once invisible and indispensable.

On east 79th Street, just as dawn breaks, a neatly suited doorman holds the door for a stream of Upper East Siders clutching coffee cups and briefcases. Few spare a thought for the city’s 30,000-odd residential building staff—doormen, porters, handymen—who oil the gears of New York’s vertical villages. Yet, this week, these workers are threatening to do what hasn’t been done in over three decades: walk off the job.

At issue is a tetchy contract negotiation between Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents roughly 32,000 building staff, and the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, representing building owners and managers. Their current contract expires on Monday. Unless there is a last-minute accord, union members are poised to strike—something not seen since 1991.

The dispute turns on wages, health benefits, and workload. Doormen start at about $61,000 a year; the union says that inflation as well as surging health-care and rent costs have eroded real incomes. Building owners offer a 2.25% wage rise; the union seeks more. Amid pandemic-era shifts, workers also want protections from mounting job demands as “amenity creep”—parcel deliveries, health checks, and sanitizing—makes their roles ever more Sisyphean.

Should workers down tools, the quiet rhythms of city life will face abrupt disruption. Apartment dwellers, especially the elderly and well-heeled, may soon struggle with tasks—hauling deliveries, managing trash, letting in dog walkers—that are usually invisibly managed. The city’s skyline is less impressive if the lobbies lie unstaffed and refuse piles up.

Property managers, for their part, fret about insurance requirements and liability: uncollected rubbish and unstaffed fire panels threaten violations. The union knows its leverage. A spring walkout would inconvenience half a million apartment dwellers, many of whom wield outsized influence. In 1991’s 12-day strike, building managers and residents filled in gamely but left many jobs half done. The city limped through; relations have rarely been cosy since.

The economic implications stretch further. Residential staff work in some of the city’s most expensive real estate, from co-ops to rentals. Landlords worry that wage deals too generous will cascade into higher monthly fees; residents, already grumbling over inflation, may be less than thrilled. For workers, however, the median New York rent is now $4,250 a month. Even a seemingly robust salary bodes frail in the face of such costs.

As with so much else, the pandemic altered the calculus. Staff who provided frontline support in 2020 now feel emboldened to demand more. Employers, squeezed by rising taxes, maintenance costs, and tenants’ pandemic flight, plead parsimony. The union’s threat is carefully timed: spring is traditionally when real estate concerns gear up for leasing and renewal.

Across the country, a resurgence in union activism gives this local standoff a national cast. Amazon workers on Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022. Hollywood writers and auto workers struck big deals last year. But New York’s building staff belong to a cohort—a lynchpin of dense urban living—whose position is peculiarly New Yorkish. Other cities have porters or supers, but only here is the doorman a character in the city’s ongoing drama.

A harbinger for labour relations, and for city life

Internationally, one finds apt comparisons. Parisian concierges, for example, have seen their numbers dwindle as automation nibbles away at jobs. Yet in both metropolises, residents continue to prize the human touch for roles as confidant, caretaker, and, at times, ad hoc security. The risk, as technology and gig work encroach, is that well-paid, secure jobs face inexorable erosion—a prospect neither unions nor building owners relish, though for opposite reasons.

We reckon that both sides are bluffing, at least a little. With rents stratospheric and buyers choosy, few owners can afford a glaring labour dispute; nor can workers stomach weeks without pay. The likely outcome: an eleventh-hour deal, doubtless with concessions disguised as brave compromise. But if a strike does materialize, it would be an unhelpful signal to a city already anxious over crime, affordability, and the return to in-person work.

The curious thing about New York is how visible its invisible workforce becomes at moments like this. A doorman’s nod, a neatly mopped marble lobby, the timely stowing of Amazon’s endless boxes—none make headlines, until they cease. As ever, the background hum of daily life risks being taken for granted, until a contract dispute brings it into relief.

All this speaks to a larger truth: in cities where density breeds reliance, essential but low-profile workers are acutely aware of their majority in a city built for—and by—the service class. Whether that majority can leverage its indispensability into greater economic security remains in flux.

Should New Yorkers find themselves juggling their own recycling and buzzing up guests next week, discomfort may be short-lived but the message, crystalline. The delicate social contract underpinning the city’s most basic comforts is less robust than it appears. The true cost of living in New York, as ever, is often measured not in dollars but in the smooth operation of the unglamorous.

Either way, come Monday, both tenants and staff will be reminded that New York’s vaunted grandeur rests, in part, on the persistent cheer and quiet efficiency of the people holding its doors.■