New Yorkers who clean the high-rent high-rise, however, are struggling. Edith Giron, a single mother with four children, works as a janitor at the building and earns $6.25 an hour with no benefits. Juana Meija, a janitor earning the same wages as Giron, needs to apply for food stamps to feed her family. She's also had to subsist on what she calls "starvation wages."
Both Giron and Meija will see a $1 an hour increase in their paycheck this month, thanks to a settlement reached in September by Muss Development and the building's workers after a bruising four-month strike. Muss has promised them that they will have health benefits for themselves and their families by January, and next April their paychecks will go up to $11.85 an hour.
The strike didn't just bring well-deserved relief to workers living in poverty. For Service Employees International Union Local 32B-J, it was also a trial run of an increasingly popular union campaign strategy: pressuring companies benefiting from public subsidies to pay their workers a living wage. It didn't win the strike, but it put the practice on the map in New York. "This is something we are going to use again," says organizer Bill Meyerson.
The union took its inspiration from the City Charter, which calls for all city contractors to pay a prevailing wage. Why not apply that principle, organizers reasoned, to the increasing numbers of companies and developers reaping city subsidies?
As much as anything, the strategy is a political one, pressuring the city to take action. Guillermo Linares, the City Councilman from Washington Heights whose constituency includes the immigrant workforce that developers like Muss rely on, now has a bill in the works that would assure a living wage and benefits for workers in companies profiting from city subsidies. "One thing we learned [from the Renaissance Plaza strike]," Linares says, "was that when there is a public-private partnership, the rights of workers are very much part of the package."
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Nonunion organizers have taken up the challenge as well. One week before the Renaissance Plaza strike began, on May 9, demonstrators marched outside the Atlantic Center Mall to demand better wages and benefits for workers in all of malls operated by Forest City Ratner, the city's largest retail developer. Al Sharpton led the chants, but the protest was organized by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now--better known as ACORN. The group, organizer Bertha Lewis explains, wants heavily subsidized, "big box" retail developers like Bruce Ratner to make mall tenants agree to pay decent wages and benefits. "If you are feeding at the public trough, then you must at least pay your workers a living wage," she says.
Ratner's company, Lewis readily admits, is no worse than any other developer. They all have the same "dead-end, low-wage, non-union, no-benefit jobs," she says. ACORN singled out Ratner because he's one of the biggest developers in the city, and because he is currently receiving more than $20 million in city subsidies. ACORN plans to use the issue of public subsidies as a litmus test during next year's City Council elections, asking candidates to commit to passing a living wage law.
