On a blustery evening at Chelsea Piers, union members from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum had the door slammed in their faces outside the museum’s 20th Anniversary Gala Dinner.

The Tenement Museum Union, affiliated with United Auto Workers Local 2110, has been trying to organize part-time and per diem workers at the cultural institution for more than a year. Museum management repeatedly has said it only will recognize a union that includes both full-time and part-time employees. Full-time workers, so far, haven’t organized.

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In the city that never stops developing, day laborers have become a growing cause for tension between unions and the contractors who employ the jornaleros (day laborers).

As major unions hold on to traditional regulations, contractors working on low-rise sites – routinely non-union jobs – have increasingly sought out workers willing to accept cheaper
pay and no benefits.

“Right now a lot of non-union contractors take advantage of the available labor,” said Louis Coletti, president of the BTEA (Buildings Trade Employers’ Association), which represents 1,500 union contractors around the city. “They offer workers $10 to $15 an hour with no training, they leave them on the worksites, and a lot of laborers never even get paid when the job’s done.”
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