doorman strike nyc 2010

doorman strike nyc 2010-Every year after Thanksgiving, merchants pull out their Christmas displays, the business section of the New York Times focuses on the retail picture for the year, children start actively campaigning to see Santa Claus, building supers suddenly become more visible, and doormen seem to improve their service. Most buildings start to sprout holiday displays, and tenants, especially newcomers to New York City, begin to experience a peculiar anxiety over how much the Christmas bonus should be. They don’t attack this problem without help, of course.
The Times runs an almost annual article on the standard tip across the various grades of workers one might find in a building—super, concierge, doormen, porter. Local newspapers—the Spirit on the Upper West Side, the Resident on the East Side—join the fray and offer more specialized guidance. But strangely, rather than reduce anxiety, the apparent presence of norms for others simply heightens concerns. Leaving aside, for the moment, newcomers, whose ignorance allows them a certain freedom to commit social errors without approbation, talk about the Christmas bonus is reserved for close intimates—like income, it is more private than sex. As one tenant reports:

I never asked anyone. Why? We know people in the building, but the people I feel comfortable asking don’t live in the building. If I asked, I would worry that they would ask in return, and I am not sure I would want to share that. It would be for fear of being embarrassed that it is not enough—that I should do more. And I don’t want to have to think about that.

But at the same time, there is often also a strange undercurrent that runs through the buildings, an intensity of interest in exactly what one’s fellow tenants may be doing this year with respect to the bonus. So while it may be the Christmas spirit, one can also notice increased talk in the halls, by the elevator, and in the lobby (when the doorman is not around) between tenants often too busy at other times during the year to so much as acknowledge their shared presence in the elevator. They want to get to the issue at hand—how much to give—but it takes some social lubrication. So for a while, the buildings take on a cheerier and friendlier light. It is a means to an end, though—getting the right information? Perhaps, but giving the wrong information could also be more accurate.
The dilemma tenants face is clear enough. The expectation is that doormen ought to get a bonus. So should the super. The conflicts when one comes to think about them can often be deep. The bonus is never not multivalent in the eyes of tenants. It is both a gift, a way of saying thanks, an obligation, and yet also a sign of expected reciprocal attention and an expression of social power. These contradictory meanings make the bonus difficult to talk about, and tenants often squirm in their seats (or cognitively) as they try to describe just what it means. For example, one tenant in an Upper West Side cooperative moves in the space of seconds from describing the bonus as a gift—“and I like giving gifts”—to a vehicle for achieving attention, to a moral commitment, to social justice abstracted from the building entirely:........ read more
that was my doorman strike nyc 2010