Facts at a Glance

Awake Bushwick

The campaign Awake Bushwick is an effort to improve the lives of retail workers who work on Knickerbocker Avenue, a major shopping street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
Almost all of the hundreds of employees in the more than 175 stores located on the one-mile long retail strip along the avenue live in the Bushwick neighborhood.

Workers Exploited

Many of the retail workers are paid below the minimum wage and do not receive the legal overtime pay rate of time-and-a-half of their hourly wage. In some stores, the employees are paid $240 a week for 72 hours of work. In many stores the employees have no sick or vacation days. In almost all the stores, no one is provided with health insurance.
If the retail workers are not being paid an illegal wage, they receive a poverty wage. The stores that are not violating the law are almost all paying the state minimum wage of $6 per hour or just a little more. Almost no worker receives a living wage.
Many of the owners of the stores have other stores located on other streets similar to Knickerbocker Ave.

Unions Make a Difference

There are only two stores on the entire Avenue which are unionized. In these stores, the employees' pay is better and a full range of benefits, including health insurance and time-off benefits, are provided.

Start of Campaign Success

The campaign has already won tens of thousands of dollars in back wages for the Knickerbocker store workers. New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer's Office is actively involved in backwage cases on the Avenue.
Boycotts have begun against stores on the Avenue to change their working conditions and a report Shame on the Street has been issued describing the working conditions in the stores.
The goal of the campaign is to transform this Avenue of Shame into one that will make the Bushwick community proud--to make the shopping area a place where neighborhood workers are are treated with respect and dignity.

Neighborhood Involvement

Along with the RWDSU and Make the Road by Walking, the New York City Jobs with Justice, the Bushwick Housing Independence Project, the Latin American Integration Center, the New York Civic Participation Project, the Working Families Party, the Long Island Free Space, Action for Community Empowerment, the Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Agricultural Missions, the Landless Movement of Brazil, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Workers Solidarity Alliance, and many neighborhood churches have joined the effort to end the illegal and poor working conditions in the Bushwick neighborhood stores.