Should employers give workers housing benefits? Unions are increasingly fighting for them.

Five years ago, Troy Bowman was earning about $14 an hour as a custodian at a Minneapolis Target. His wages were so low that a breakup led him to a stint sleeping in his car. That led, in turn, to a room in a transitional housing facility, where he pays rent for a private room but shares the kitchen and bathroom with other residents.

In 2021 he found a job as a community safety specialist that came with a 39% increase in pay to $19.50 an hour. Yet the worsening housing affordability crisis prevented him from moving out of the Catholic Charities facility, where the 59-year-old still lives today.

The median rent for a one-bedroom in Minneapolis is almost $1,000, which feels out of reach for him after paying for his room, cellphone and car, as well as providing some financial support to his teenage daughter. Even with a recent bump in pay to nearly $23 an hour, Bowman feels stuck. “I get up and go to work every day. But why do I have to struggle so hard to make it?” he said.

Bowman faces a common problem for working Americans. For decades, housing costs have risen more quickly than income, leaving even some full-time workers unable to afford a place to live. The resulting gap between rent and wages is increasingly becoming an issue for unions. Indeed, from New York to California, Minnesota to Vermont, labor unions and other worker organizations are advocating for affordable housing at the bargaining table and beyond.

A flagship example of unions demanding affordable housing is the Chicago Teachers Union. That group kicked off a wave of housing-related union actions after striking in 2019 over affordable housing and homelessness, issues for which they demanded solutions in their contract.

“This is a widely and deeply felt issue for their membership … and it’s also affecting the community,” said Sara Myklebust, research director at Bargaining for the Common Good, a network of unions and community groups. Myklebust says CTU was a leader in turning housing into a union issue.

After developing large affordable housing projects earlier in the 20th century, most unions shifted their focus to wages and benefits — and left housing to the market and government, says Joseph McCartin, executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. ”It’s only in recent years that unions are starting to return to that issue,” said McCartin, in the wake of the skyrocketing cost of housing since the Great Recession.

More recently, the Boston Teachers Union won a pilot program to provide housing support for homeless families in its 2022 contract with Boston Public Schools. That year, academic workers at the University of California demanded affordable rents in university housing during a union fight.

This March, 16 unions across New York state joined a coalition supporting a bill to cap rent increases and enhance tenant protections. “As a labor union we can bargain for [wage] increases at the table, but that is immediately eaten up by rent increases, and people don’t feel like they’re able to move forward,” said Helen Schaub, interim political director at 1199SEIU.

In July, Los Angeles hotel workers went on strike after contracts expired. They demanded more pay and a new 7% fee at unionized hotels to fund affordable housing for hospitality workers. Kurt Petersen, co-president of with UNITE HERE Local 11, told NPR the plan could bring in $150 million a year and pay for 2,000 to 3,000 units of new construction. (Disclosure: SEIU and UNITE HERE are financial supporters of Capital & Main.) 

And throughout the past few years, Bowman’s union in Minneapolis, SEIU Local 26, has emphasized housing costs as more of its members struggled with rent after the 2008 housing crash. In a 2023 member survey, housing ranked as the most common concern. In response, the union has been working with housing advocates to support rent stabilization, pushing for community-owned housing (coops and public housing), and calling for an end to tax breaks for developers whose projects won’t be affordable long term.

Few of these efforts have yielded much change as of yet. The Chicago Teachers Union demand was ultimately dropped from the contract negotiations, though it generated a critical editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times. The proposal in New York failed to gain the support of Gov. Kathy Hochul, putting the effort on pause. The L.A. hotel workers still haven’t reached an agreement with most hotels (although the city council advanced an ordinance in November that reflected a union demand for developers to replace housing lost to hotel construction), and the UC academic workers won wage increases — but no specific breaks on rent for university housing.

Developing affordable housing for workers

While most worker demands around housing center on affordability, some organizations are pushing for employers or unions to develop quality housing directly for workers.

In Vermont, a group called Migrant Justice is campaigning for dairy employers to improve housing for farm workers, which is often provided by an employer. Under a worker social responsibility program called Milk with Dignity, the group is pushing food companies that buy from local dairies to require good housing, among other things, as a condition of doing business. So far, Ben & Jerry’s has signed on, and the group is campaigning for the Hannaford supermarket chain to join.

Other unions are experimenting with developing affordable housing for workers. The practice was more common for unions in the early and mid-20th century, particularly in New York, and it was often done in close partnership with local government, said Christopher Hayes, a labor historian at Rutgers University.

Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District is looking to add more affordable housing for low-income students and families on district-owned land, which was incorporated into its April agreement with the teachers’ union. The district previously had expressed interest in developing more workforce housing for teachers. It had already built three projects with 185 units, which presented real challenges: Demand is high, there are long waitlists, and even new teachers found out they earned too much to qualify. (Lower-paid school employees such as janitors and cafeteria workers did meet income limits.)

In Welch, West Virginia, the American Federation of Teachers worked with partners to fund and develop a mixed-use building that included 20 low-cost apartments for teachers (and other professionals). Keeping the new construction project affordable was a struggle. It was eventually scaled back from a five-story building to four, and took more than a decade to complete.

“We were glad we did this, but we’re not going to be in the business of building housing,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. AFT made a grant for the project, but “the union can’t be the financier of last resort.” She said the housing affordability crisis “has to be solved politically.”

Living on hope, fearing displacement

Until that political solution appears, workers like Kathryn Jackson, are doing the best they can.

In 2019, Jackson moved into a shelter with her daughter. Although the hospital records clerk in New York City earned $21 an hour and belonged to SEIU Local 1199, her rent plus her daughter’s college tuition had stretched her budget so thin that she had spent down her pension to make ends meet. “It was traumatic,” said Jackson, who is now 59. “You’re afraid. You don’t know what you’re up against.”

The shelter felt like a prison to her. Jackson had to ask permission to leave the premises, and be present to sign in every night for her bed. By the time Jackson and her daughter had saved enough to look for a new apartment in 2021, the median rent in their native Brooklyn was more than $3,000 for a two-bedroom. On her commute from the shelter to the hospital, Jackson would cry.

Jackson eventually secured a two-bedroom apartment for $1,700 a month through a city program that covers the first year of rent in an apartment for working homeless people. She is settled, relieved to have moved out of the shelter system — and grateful to have found a place back home in Brooklyn.

Still, it feels tenuous. Jackson’s apartment is in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood known for the Black celebrities who have claimed it as home: Jay-Z, Notorious BIG, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan. Today it is one of the most quickly gentrifying areas in the country, its Black population being rapidly displaced by white residents as rents rise. Median rents increased by 89% from 2006 to 2021. By October 2023, two-bedrooms in the area were renting for about $3,100. “I’m just hoping that they do not decide to increase the rent or sell the building,” she said.