NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The deal came just days before nearly 34,000 workers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goals were simple: to raise the wage to a level that our members can live in this city,\u201d to protect health benefits and to improve pensions, union President Manny Pastreich said at a news conference. He called the proposed contract \u201can incredibly good deal for both sides.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, both sides thought carefully about the current economic situation and how to make contract improvements that we can all agree with,\u201d Rothschild said at the news conference.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Realty Advisory Board said the union was being unrealistic at a time when owners\u2019 costs also are rising and landlords face a potential rent freeze on 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, an idea championed by Mamdani.<\/p>\n
The union\u2019s last strike, in 1991, lasted 12 days.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Union leaders representing thousands of New York City apartment house doorpersons, superintendents and other…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":{"0":"post-201432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-city-news","12":"tag-ny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}