N.Y.C. Doormen and Building Owners Reach an Agreement to Avert a Strike

Source: NYT

The deal would provide pay raises and maintain free health insurance for about 34,000 apartment building workers.

By Patrick McGeehan April 17, 2026

Just two days after staging a raucous rally on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a union representing about 34,000 doormen and other residential-building service workers in New York City said it had averted a looming strike by reaching a tentative contract deal with the owners of roughly 3,500 apartment buildings.

The workers’ union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, had threatened to strike as soon as Tuesday if it could not come to terms on a new contract with the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, which represents the building owners. The current contract expires on Monday and both sides had reported that negotiations were tense and an agreement did not appear imminent.

But by Friday afternoon, leaders of the two sides stood together at a lectern in a Midtown hotel to announce the basic terms of a new four-year contract that would quash any more talk of a walkout and relieve apartment-dwellers across the city of responsibility for hauling out trash or sorting packages. Sign-up sheets had circulated among tenants, seeking volunteers to perform those duties in the event of a strike.

“If there was a strike, everyone loses,” Howard Rothschild, the president of the Realty Advisory Board, said. “We wanted to figure out a way to win.”

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The union representing apartment building workers had been negotiating a contract with the owners of about 3,500 buildings.Credit...Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times

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