This Time, a Real Raise
The next UFT-DOE contract should grant long overdue raises well above inflation
The contract covering 125,000 members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) will expire after September 13th. Progress on a new contract is a mystery, since the UFT pursues closed bargaining, and its officers negotiate secretly with city officials. I’ve written before about how this strategy undermines our leverage, of which we’ll need in abundance if we’re to extract concessions from a Mayor who’s set aside enough for a measly 1.25% annual wage increase.
Despite what Adams thinks, educators (indeed, all workers) deserve nothing less than raises well above the rate of inflation, which is currently 8.5%. We need it to afford living in the city we serve. Furthermore, we work a lot more hours than our contract suggests for a lot less. Our workloads have only gotten heavier from the pandemic. New Yorkers pay a wage penalty for becoming a teacher, earning salaries 13% less than our counterparts in other industries. Indeed, the 2019 contract turned out to be a pay cut as inflation has eaten away its meager ~2% annual raise increase. Finally, it’s well known that educators pay for classroom supplies (on average $478) from their own pockets—an unacceptable expense that will be higher this year. While we’re overdue for large raises, we also need it to weather the coming storm. The Feds plan to cool the economy on the backs of workers, with Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell promising to “bring some pain to households and businesses.”
Need is high, but the government will insist that higher salaries are impossible. They’ll cry broke, as they always do. It’s true that projections show declining tax revenues. But Wall Street is undertaxed, and this year corporate profit margins are the widest they’ve been since 1950. They’ll also try to pit us against each other. Early this summer Mayor Adams and his Chancellor David Banks claimed (or more accurately, threatened) that they would cut social workers and art programs to reduce class sizes if Albany’s bill became law. They did this anyway back in June, cutting classroom budgets significantly despite sitting on billions of dollars of federal COVID funds. Politics, not finances, drives them to defund public education.
Case in point—there’s always cash for cops and capitalists. It’s there when government wants to settle police misconduct cases, clear homeless encampments, entice multibillion dollar corporations to gentrify the city, and incentivize development from the real estate industry—who are donating handsomely to Mayor Adam’s re-election campaign—responsible for the city’s housing crisis. The money is there, in profit margins and for weapons.
The UFT is a big union with enough leverage to disrupt this status quo. In 1975 the union went on strike for inflation-adjusted raises. The strike was lost for several reasons: there was a real financial crisis, the labor movement was divided, and the UFT leadership failed to lead a strike they didn’t want. Things are different today: there’s a teacher shortage, the city is flush with federal money, and popularity for unions is high. We’re in a strong position to reject concessionary bargaining, push back against divide-and-conquer tactics, and win raises and rights that the UFT’s strategy of “business unionism” has failed to secure. I think the only way to realize our power is to publicly build a strike-ready union: establish a strike fund, educate chapters on strike strategy and history, build solidarity with families and other unions, and chart a plan for escalating tactics toward a strike if the mayor forces us there.
Without strike readiness, we stay stuck in a cycle of givebacks. Unfortunately, UFT President Michael Mulgrew is working with the mayor to privatize Medicare. Adams may be stalling on starting negotiations with public sector unions until the City Council forces retirees into a private plan that’ll increase health care expenses for less coverage. Union officials are probably relying on savings from Medicare privatization to negotiate better salaries and benefits for in-service members. Since their starting point is the myth of scarcity, union officials work behind closed doors with the boss to cut corners. The consequence is a race to the bottom where solidarity erodes and all workers lose. It doesn’t have to be this way.
A labor contract under capitalism will never be fair. Compromise with a system reliant on exploitation and oppression still leaves the system intact. But in between now and revolution, we can certainly do better, especially us educators.