Following the authorization of a strike for Black Friday last week that would have been its first walkout since the 1990s, the Strand Union resumed contract negotiations with the management at Strand Book Store in New York on Wednesday, November 27, calling off the strike before one of the year’s biggest days in retail. Unionized employees at the Strand are members of United Auto Workers Local 2179, and comprise roughly 80 workers at the Strand’s Union Square flagship and Upper West Side satellite as well as its Brooklyn warehouse.
“We look forward to our meeting with the staff’s representatives this week, and we expect both sides will continue to bargain in good faith, as has been the case since September,” Carson Moss, COO at the Strand, said in a statement to PW on Monday morning. “There has been progress made in the economic and policy proposals initially presented, and our hope is to resolve any outstanding differences shortly.”
While the contract for union workers at the Strand was set to expire last August, the bargaining unit and management agreed to several extensions through midnight on Thanksgiving, November 28, when it expired. Will Bobrowski, Local 2179’s second VP and a former Strand employee, said that the negotiations on Wednesday saw both sides making “some pretty substantial moves,” with “a lot of movement on wages in both directions” for both base level pay and above.
Bobrowski said that Strand management requested an extension of the contract through this Wednesday, December 4, but the union opted to let the contract expire, with unionized employees working without a contract until after negotiations resume that day. “We felt it was in the spirit of the day to be clear to them that we're not going on strike this coming weekend, and we look forward to going back to the bargaining table this coming Wednesday,” Bobrowski told PW last week, noting that the negotiations would have resumed earlier if not for the holiday weekend.
While Bobrowski explained that the negotiations at this point are “mainly about wages,” he added that the union remains concerned about low staff levels at the stores, which he said are under 100—“way below” the nearly 200 staffers laid off at the store at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. “New York is back,” he said. “The tourists are back. The business is coming back, and still were at this low staffing level. They're paying this low rate to hire, so you can't retain people.”
