With industry analysts pointing to the biggest sales increases in four years, New York's retailers have rendered their judgment that the 2003 holiday shopping season was a success.

That should be good news for the 270,000 sales clerks, warehouse workers and other New Yorkers who earn their living as retail workers. But if it is, few are celebrating.

The reason is that even though New York stores are great places to shop, they're becoming awful places to work. What's more, unless retail workers have a union, it's only going to get worse. That's the conclusion economist Moshe Adler reached in a recent report issued by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. He's right.

Adler, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, points out that since 1989 the average hourly wage of New York retail workers without a college degree fell by 65 cents. Further, nearly two-thirds of New York's full-time retail employees are not covered by health insurance provided through their workplace. The result of this downward spiral is that a growing number of New York retail workers now qualify for Medicaid, food stamps, rent subsidies and other family assistance. Adler found that nearly three quarters of the New York retail workers who receive help from these programs actually work full-time. In other words, since retailers aren't offering workers what they need to survive, New York taxpayers are stepping in to pay the difference. The cost to taxpayers? About $1.1 billion annually.

Sticking taxpayers with the tab for low wages isn't unique to New York merchants. In fact, it's business as usual for the nation's largest retailer: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pays its "associates" so little that the average worker grosses only $1,000 in pay each month. As a result, few are able to afford the monthly payments of roughly $250 it costs to buy health insurance from Wal-Mart's medical plan. That's assuming a worker stays long enough to meet Wal-Mart's eligibility requirements. The upshot is that workers and their families go without care or, like others who are uninsured, turn to hospital emergency rooms for treatment.

In Southern California Wal-Mart's strategy has helped trigger a "race to the bottom" among local retailers who now are also trying to increase profits by reducing worker benefits. Today, 70,000 California grocery workers are on strike to keep this from occurring.

As a community, we share a stake in seeing to it that New York retail workers earn a fair wage and good benefits. This is especially true since New York's retail sector now offers employment to women and men who need good jobs the most: minority working parents who lack a college degree.

Today, roughly half of New York's retail workers have children under the age of 18; 67 percent are non-white and 65 percent lack a college education. Once many of these New Yorkers might have found good paying jobs at unionized factories. But manufacturing today employs only 8 percent of non-degreed workers; down from 15 percent in 1989.

Given that unionization raises workers' wages and benefits by about 28 percent, Adler points out, there's no reason why a fully unionized retail sector can't provide working class New Yorkers with the same opportunity that manufacturing jobs once offered.

Of course, there's nothing new about retail workers organizing. What is new is the length employers will go to deny workers their right to a union contract.

Last year, for example, 120 cosmetic and fragrance department employees of Manhattan's Saks 5th Avenue voted to join our union. But to do so they had to withstand an anti-union campaign by the company including one-on-one intimidation meetings with managers. And the problem isn't only at unorganized workplaces, either.

Despite a 40-year history of collective bargaining, Duane Reade drugstores has been refusing for more than 25 months to negotiate a new contract covering 2,600 workers at 142 of its stores in the New York metropolitan area.

The rampant anti-worker sentiment among employers in New York's retail sector isn't a scandal, but it should be. Part of the reason it isn't is that too many public officials behave as if challenging the behavior of a major merchant will send them packing for Mexico or China, let alone New Jersey. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Retailers want to go where their customers are - and no city offers retailers more customers than New York.

If the city is asked to rezone property or provide other assistance to help a retailer, city officials ought to require that, in return, employers provide health care to workers and do nothing to impede their right to organize to have a union contract. After all, every New Yorker gains when all New Yorkers earn enough to move out of poverty and into the middle-class.