NYC's Unionized Greenmarket Workers Win Higher Wages (And the Right to Sit Down)

On Friday, workers at GrowNYC, the nonprofit that organizes farmer's markets, food education, and other environmental programs around the city, announced that they had ratified their first contract since workers unionized in May 2023.

As someone who's worked as a manager of GrowNYC's Greenmarkets in Brooklyn, the job is certainly spiritually nourishing—I got to oversee a strawberry shortcake competition, make kids and other marketgoers food with local produce, and help people on SNAP get tokens for the market. The actual management knows that people like the job, and frankly takes advantage of it—the pay sucks, or at least it did when I worked there. The hours were long, there was very little infrastructure in place for calling out sick, and, most bizarrely, they insisted that employees never sit down.