Saks Fifth Avenue this week told more than 100 workers at the Midtown flagship store they will lose their jobs after the holidays.
Sources told The Post that the iconic luxury store on Fifth Avenue informed about 116 sales associates and beauticians in the cosmetics and fragrance department — which by several measures is the largest in the nation — that their jobs would be eliminated by the end of January.
Union officials yesterday said the news comes two weeks after the union filed a petition to organize the cosmetics and fragrance staff following two previous, unsuccessful attempts.
“The timing is very suspicious,” said Gemma de Leon, executive vice president of Local 1102 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “If they’re doing this to avoid having their employees unionize, it’s against the law.”
A Saks spokeswoman told The Post yesterday that the staff cuts, which will be effective Jan. 31, are “unrelated to the petition.”
Saks on Monday told employees — some of whom had worked the counters on the ground floor for as long as 20 years — that the layoffs were part of a strategic move to let cosmetics and that fragrance brands like Chanel, Lancome and Clinique fully staff the counters themselves.
The strategy — already adopted at the rest of the Saks chain this summer — is also the standard practice at competing department stores including Bloomingdale’s, the company said.
“We believe this model will provide the best shopping experience for our customers,” Saks spokeswoman Julia Bentley told The Post, noting that the practice of having beauticians “hand off” customers to another associate to ring up a sale has confused clients in the past.
But Saks meanwhile has been negotiating with union officials over wages, said Richard Greenspan, an attorney for the union. Fearing that Saks was moving to lower sales commissions, associates last month voted to authorize an election, sources said.
Saks employees remain unorganized except for a contingent within the retailer’s shoe department. This week’s layoffs won’t affect workers in other departments, the company said.
Cosmetics and fragrance brands, which already provide about 70 percent of the staff to sell their products at the Saks flagship, will move that figure to 100 percent at the end of January, the company said.