The settlement covers workers at many prominent buildings, including the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and the World Financial Center.  Under the contract that expires on Monday, the workers received raises totaling 5 percent over three years; those raises were held down because the building owners had agreed to contribute an unusually large amount into the union’s health plan to rescue it from insolvency.  “From a wage standpoint the last agreement was pretty spare on wages,” said James F. Berg, the president of the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations and management’s chief negotiator. “I don’t think this agreement is inconsistent with the cost of living in the city.”  The union and the Realty Advisory Board announced the agreement at 2 p.m. on Saturday at the Sheraton New York Hotel after a bargaining session reached a tentative settlement at 2:45 a.m.  The two sides waited to make the announcement until management’s negotiating committee and the union’s bargaining committee had approved the deal.  Mr. Berg said the agreement, when wage and benefit increases were taken together, included a 4.18 percent annual raise over four years. Under the accord, management will increase its health plan contributions by 20 percent over four years and its pension contributions by 40 percent.  In addition to those increases, Mr. Berg said, “We also have achieved mutual understandings that will enable the industry to function smoothly and efficiently over the next four years.”  In the back and forth of recent weeks, the union asserted that management could afford large raises because Manhattan’s commercial real estate commands the highest rents and sale prices per square foot in the nation and because those rents and sale prices have continued to rise in recent years. But management countered that it had to be wary of granting sizable raises because the nation’s economy and real estate industry risked being hit by recession.  “We made it clear to the Realty Advisory Board that at a time when they’re making unprecedented profits, we expected to get substantial increases,” Mr. Fishman said. “We live in the same city as they do, but we live in different worlds.”  Local 32BJ last staged a strike in New York in 1996, inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of office workers in a monthlong walkout that caused managers to scramble to have wastebaskets emptied and bathrooms cleaned.  The building service workers in Manhattan will hold a ratification vote over the next month. The building owners are scheduled to vote on the accord next week.  Over the past three days, Local 32BJ, which represents building service workers from Hartford to Washington, D.C., has also reached tentative contracts for workers in New Jersey, Westchester County, Fairfield County and Hartford, Baltimore, Washington and Montgomery County, Md. The union is still locked in a contract dispute for building-service workers on Long Island.  Kate Ferranti, a union spokeswoman, said that in those settlements the union has gone far toward its goals of creating national standards for janitors, transforming many jobs from part time to full time and getting many janitors family health coverage.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 122 of the New York edition with the headline: With New Contract, Union’s 26,000 Office-Building Workers Avert a Strike. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The union representing janitors, doormen and other workers at 1,000 New York City office buildings reached a tentative four-year contract on Saturday, averting a New Year’s Day strike.