Life

Labor Woes At Bloomingdales

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By Phoebe Maltz Bovy April 18, 2017

For shoppers and browsers, department stores can be a fragrant, shiny escape from the harsh outside world. (I know this from personal experience and having read — and taught — Emile Zola’s novel, “The Ladies’ Paradise.”) Not so, necessarily, for the stores’ workers.

At The Cut, Diana Tsui reports that Bloomingdales employees are having a rally today in anticipation of a possible May 1 strike of “the department store’s 2,000 unionized retail workers [whose] contract sets to expire May 1.” If the strike proceeds, writes Tsui, “this will be the biggest shutdown in over five decades.”

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at bovy@forward.com. She is the author of “The Perils Of ‘Privilege’”, from St. Martin’s Press. Follow her on Twitter, @tweetertation

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

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