Lawsuit vs. new jail in Chinatown
A months-long organizing effort among Housing Works employees came to a head Thursday when staffers confronted CEO Charles King in his office to demand he recognize their right to join a union.
King, 65, sat back in his chair and listened as about a dozen of his employees — holding fake flowers and heart-shaped Valentine’s Day cards — made their case.
But in the end, King, who has headed up the progressive non-profit for decades, was unmoved.
“I again am saying no, we are neutral, we will allow the [National Labor Relations Board] process to roll out, and we will respect whatever decision comes out of that election,” he told the room.
King also told his staffers he was concerned that they were meeting during store hours to discuss their effort to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. He also said he’d heard that some strongly pro-labor staffers were harassing colleagues to sign union cards — an allegation the employees said was unfounded.
The sometimes tense confrontation followed seven months of dogged attempts from RWDSU to wring union recognition from King and Housing Works’ management.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of RWDSU, said the resistance to unionizing was unexpected from a nonprofit created in 1990 to help homeless people with HIV. In recent decades, Housing Works has morphed into a wide-ranging social justice organization that provides health care, housing assistance and emotional counseling to thousands of needy people.
“Given what Housing Works is, and its history, we thought that it would be open to real dialogue with workers. Instead we have found management to be even worse than for-profit companies with which we’ve dealt,” said Appelbaum, who accuses King of hiring a notorious union-busting law firm to fight the employees’ efforts.
King, speaking to the Daily
News over the phone after the meeting, denied trying to interfere in the workers’ organizing drive.
“We have said from the beginning that we honor the right of every employee to either join the union or not join the union,” he said.
But his staffers feel differently. Their key complaints center around wages so low some workers are forced to live in shelters, lack of safety and confidentiality on the job, unmanageable caseloads and little to no institutional support.
“I just had a conversation with one of my colleagues like a month ago, and he was telling me that [he was experiencing homelessness],” said Adrian Downing-Espinal, 39, who works with active drug users as a harm-reduction counselor. “He can’t come to our union meetings because he has a curfew at a shelter. It’s pretty mind blowing.”
As workers walked out of King’s office Thursday, they said they will file an official petition to unionize with the NLRB on Friday. That will likely set off a formal election and recognition process which could stretch on for months, but the staff hopes the effort will be worth it.
“It feels very hypocritical to be working in an agency that’s supposed to end homelessness and that some of our coworkers are facing that,” said Ilana Engelberg, 27, a care manager at one of the organization’s Brooklyn facilities.
And better working conditions wouldn’t just help employees, she noted. It would improve things for their clients, too.
“They really need to have 100% of our attention, but with our caseloads being as high as they are, it’s really hard to give each person the full services,” she said.
The city’s plan to construct a jail in Chinatown routinely neglected community input, including Native Americans concerned about the possibility of large amounts of human remains in the area of the planned facility, a lawsuit set to be filed Friday claims.
The suit, which will be filed by Neighbors United Below Canal and American Indian Community House, claims the city’s plan will cause “irreparable damage to indigenous lands” and that the city failed to adequately reach out to neighborhood organizations and affected residents.
“The work and outreach that’s gone into this lawsuit is work the city should have been doing in the first place,” said Jan Lee, who runs Neighbors United Below Canal. “It’s a robust case because we did meaningful outreach to our neighbors and came to realize just how deeply negligent the mayor’s plan was from the very beginning.”
The suit, which was shared with the Daily News, also alleges the city violated its own land use procedure, in which the City Council must approve projects before they can be built, by changing the proposed location of the Manhattan facility from 80 Centre St. to 124-125 White St. at the last minute. The White St. location is where the borough’s current jail , known as The Tombs, stands.
“Although the community was not pleased with the initial proposal to build a new jail structure at 80 Centre St., the change of location was even worse,” a draft of the lawsuit reads, noting that the new plan puts the jail near residences, small retailers and a senior center.
Elderly residents of the Chung Pak center on Baxter St. expressed concerns throughout the planning process that construction could “exacerbate the level of air pollution” and increase noise levels in ways that could harm them.
The city also identified that there is a “moderate to high” possibility of Native American remains at the site of the proposed Chinatown jail.