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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan.25, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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The strike by over 30,000 members of Service Employees Local 32B-32J at 1,000 office buildings here enters its third week Jan. 18. Despite bitter cold weather, strikers are walking the picket lines round the clock to defend their jobs and their union.
The biggest issue is the realtors' demand to lower the starting wage by 40 percent, thus creating a two-tier wage system that would inevitably threaten union jobs at decent wages.
The Realty Advisory Board represents most of the building owners and managers. The union represents the office cleaners, elevator operators, janitors, porters and repair workers.
They are the epitome of the multinational U.S. working class, coming as they do from many different countries and experiences.
One striker told Workers World: "The thought of being asked to take a cut in pay of almost half is insulting. We've fought for our wages and benefits for over 50 years. And now we're fighting for our older workers as well as for the youth."
The union has said that it will not return to the bargaining table until the demand for the two-tier wage system is dropped.
Strikers on the picket lines continue to spark militant action. At Rockefeller Center, rank-and-file strikers have organized a daily march, swelling to hundreds of strikers and their supporters, around the midtown complex.
At the World Trade Center, strikers continue to confront scabs, despite court injunctions against the union.
At New York University on Jan. 17, clerical and technical workers--members of Teachers Local 3882--staged a solidarity rally in support of the several hundred 32B-32J strikers there.
In a letter to strikers written after a meeting with over 100 union leaders in the city, Local 32B-32J President Gus Bevona said, "Support is growing across the country, and here in New York, the Central Labor Council, its more than 400 affiliated unions and the 1.5 million working men and women they represent stand with us."
At the Jan. 10 meeting, leaders of area unions said they would instruct their members to honor picket lines, and that they would contribute to the strike fund, pressure landlords to sign a contract and reach out to other unions to support the strike.
At many sites United Parcel Service drivers, who are members of the Teamsters union, are refusing to deliver packages into buildings. Federal Express drivers are not unionized--yet many of them are also honoring the picket lines, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The buildings themselves are beginning to reek. Garbage, snow, and mail lie unattended. Although replacement workers are being brought in by the owners, bathrooms remain dirty and floors and countertops sticky.
A key strategy of the building owners has been to appeal to building occupants to do "their share" and cooperate with management. Members of Newspaper Guild Local 3, the Time- Life unit at Rockefeller Center, responded to this by calling on all building occupants to refuse to do any of the strikers' work such as hauling trash to elevator areas.
As the strikers have stated, the owners are not compensating anyone for this extra work, which may be hazardous, and so the landlords are saving lots of money during the strike.
The landlords are also counting on the police and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to help them break the strike. The police continue to threaten arrest and to escort replacement workers into the buildings and protect them as they shovel snow.
The landlords are cynically calling people who have applied for work in the past five years to break the strike. These are some of the poorest people in the city. Many have been out of work for far too long.
The landlords are pitting them against the strikers-- usually without informing them that they will be taking strikers' jobs. This violates state law.
In New York, the millionaires and billionaires who make up the ruling class are mostly involved with real estate. The property they own, especially in Manhattan south of 96th Street, is among the most valuable per square foot in the country.
As real-estate prices climbed during the 1980s, they built and built, hoping to make more profits. Now they have glutted the market with an overproduction of real estate, particularly office buildings. They want to cut workers' wages to increase their own profits.
There is another element to the confrontation between the realtors and the union. A Jan. 15 New York Times article accurately characterized this as a "high-stakes strike."
In the story, Times reporter Steven Greenhouse wrote, "New York's real-estate industry is making a frontal assault on [AFL-CIO President John] Sweeney's principal strategy for breathing new life into the labor movement: organizing low- wage service workers and winning them improved contracts," Greenhouse wrote.
AFL-CIO spokesperson Ray Abernathy told the Times, "John Sweeney is furious. He came to New York a month ago and talked about building bridges with management, with many of the people who provoked the strike sitting in the room.
"Now, he's been sent a message loud and clear and personal by this outrageous demand that has forced workers out into the street."
So far, Sweeney has not made an appearance on the New York picket lines.
The strikers are pushing forward, infuriated with the attack from the rich landlords. "These landlords don't care about us. They're just like my landlord that charges me $800 a month," said Dominga Alvarez, who has worked at 1251 Sixth Avenue cleaning offices for 25 years.
"And do you think he cares whether I'm working or whether I can afford my rent? No he doesn't care, he just wants my money."
The strikers are not fooled. They know who they are up against. And that is why Local 32B-32J is making a name for itself among the workers in New York.
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