The Year Of The (Inflatable) Rat

The Sun reports that city doormen may go on strike if their contract demands are not met:

The union for about 28,000 doormen, elevator operators, porters, and other residential building employees is in down-to-the-wire contract negotiations and has already authorized its board to call an April 21 strike if a fair deal is not reached.

“Everything goes up, the inflation rate goes up, rent goes up, but our salaries diminish,” a doorman at a co-op building on the Upper East Side, Boris Buliga, said yesterday.

A strike of those who watch over some of the most elegant and expensive homes in the country would be the first since 1991, when the employees walked off the job for 12 days. Doormen also went on strike in 1979 and 1976.

A strike would affect 3,500 buildings across the city, including 2,500 in Manhattan, where in many cases management has just started to blanket tenants with contingency plans that call for resident volunteers to take out the trash and fill in for rotating shifts at the front door.

Both the union and management sides said they were in contract talks yesterday and would continue through the deadline.

One Gramercy Park building sent out letters to all residents notifying them that no move-ins or outs will be permitted in the event of a strike; that garbage chutes will be closed so residents will have to haul their own garbage to the curb; that a security guard will be hired, and residents will be given special identification passes to get in.

The sticking points in negotiations between the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, which represents the building employees, and the Realty Advisory Board are wages, pensions, and health care.

The board, which represents building management, is asking for a salary freeze for one year and that employees start kicking in 15% of health care costs or about $1,400 a year for each employee. They say that rising health care costs are putting pressure on building managers.

. . .

A professor of law who specializes in employment issues at New York Law School, Arthur Leonard, said a strike would likely mean no package deliveries and no home renovations because other union workers will be unwilling to cross the picket lines.

In the 1991 strike UPS workers did not cross the line. A spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents UPS workers, Bret Caldwell, said yesterday, “if there’s a picket line we won’t cross it.”

First the liquor distributor truck drivers and warehouse workers (whatever happened to that?), then the transit strike, then the NYU grad students, then the Co-op City security staff, then the private waste haulers — this could be the year of the strike . . .