VOTE NO on UFT-D.O.E. Sellout Deal

 

If We Act Together, Teachers, Transit and All NYC Municipal Workers Can Shred the “No Strike” Taylor Law 

VOTE NO on UFT-D.O.E. Sellout Deal
It Will Take a Strike to Win 

A little before noon on Tuesday, June 13, New York City mayor Eric Adams announced that agreement had been reached with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) on a five-year contract covering 120,000 employees of the city’s Department of Education (D.O.E.). The boldface figures were wage increases of 3% in the first three years, and a fraction more in years four and five. Do the math: with inflation in the NYC metropolitan area of 6.3% last year, a 3% “raise” amounts to a PAY CUT. 

UFT president Michael Mulgrew hyped an annual retention bonus of $1,000 (after May 2026, less before then). And then, in the time-honored manner of the UFT bureaucracy (a/k/a the “Unity Caucus”), having sprung the deal on the day of a union Delegate Assembly, Mulgrew rushed it through the D.A. With no more to go on than a Power Point presentation of some highlights and a truncated Q&A, with no time for substantive debate, by 6:15 p.m. the D.A. voted to send the Memorandum of Agreement (MoA), sight unseen, to the membership for ratification.

This rotten deal is sucker bait. It is a cover for health care cuts, larger class sizes, more segregation, and the money is a swindle, a pay cut disguised as a raise, hitting the lowest-paid education workers the hardest. It should be decisively defeated. But a resounding “no” vote would only be the beginning. The UFT tops hide behind the New York state Taylor Law, which bans strikes by public employees. But to overcome a betrayal like this, the UFT would have to strike. And that requires preparation.

When the MoA was released the next day, what was in there – and what was not – underlined the outstanding reasons why this sellout contract should be decisively voted down. We can start with the money, although that is by no means the main reason the MoA should be rejected. First there is the “ratification bonus.” $3,000 sounds good, but don’t expect to see anything like that in your bank account, as income tax on bonuses is withheld at a much higher rate. 

Also, teacher aides and paraprofessionals are not just shortchanged in this contract, they are being shafted. An aide will make under $30,000 a year base pay in 2024 and most paras top out at under $40,000 even after 15 years on the job. You can’t live on that in NYC, where $20,000 a year ($1,650/mo.) is a low rent, if you can find it. Many aides and paras have to have a second job to make ends meet. Paraprofessionals and school aides need a huge pay raise, as do school cafeteria workers (who are not in the UFT). All UFTers should fight for them to get it, NOW. 

Perhaps the biggest reason to vote this sellout contract down is health care. There is no mention of it in the MoA, but a big hunk of the money to pay for the salary increases is coming from the “savings” the D.O.E. plans to wring out of health care. For the past two years, retired UFT and city workers have been fighting against the plan – initiated by Bill de Blasio and taken over by Adams – to force retirees off Medicare, a federal health insurance plan, onto a “Medicare Advantage” plan which is government-funded but privately managed. Under this, insurance companies make huge profits by denying needed medical procedures and medications. 

Across the country, almost half of Medicare recipients have been forced onto these privatized insurance plans as the insurance giants milk multibillion profits from the government till. Moreover, the company that won the NYC Medicare Advantage contract, Aetna (owned by CVS Pharmacy) has one of the highest rates of denying procedures and medications ordered by doctors that a government audit found to be medically justified. Despite many protests and several court suits, Adams seems to be successfully ramming through this attack on retirees’ health care.

Meanwhile, the city is also seeking to slash health care costs by putting out bids to insurers to offer plans costing 10% less than the present GHI EmblemHealth plans for 750,000 in-service city workers and dependents. The D.O.E. has been doing this ever since the 2014 contract, when they “saved” millions by taking the money out of employees’ pockets through “co-pays,” and later by forcing new teachers into the HIP HMO plan, where the insurance company decides. UFTers should demand: Stop the “Medicare Advantage” Swindle! Hands Off Our Health Care! UFT members should also sign the petition to demand the right to vote on any changes to health care. 

Another key thing that is not in the D.O.E.-UFT agreement is class size. At a number of our schools we demonstrated last fall for the City Council bill to sharply lower class sizes, although the UFT tops did little to support this. The bill died in committee, although a majority of the City Council endorsed it. But then a state law was passed that mandated cutting maximum class sizes in high school, for example, from 34 students to 25. This would be a huge gain for public education. Reductions were supposed to start in September 2023, but since the bill became law (despite resistance from the Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams) nothing has been done to implement it. 

Until now, class sizes have been stipulated in the contract. But in this MoA, nothing. The D.O.E. and UFT tops are acting as if the heat is off because actual class sizes fell below the limits in the pandemic. But now they are rising again, and this school year over 230,000 students were crammed into classes of more than 30 students. In District 20 (South Brooklyn), high schools are at 130% of capacity, particularly as large numbers of new immigrants have arrived. UFTers should demand that the mandated class-size reductions be written into the contract and implemented NOW. 

A third key area unmentioned in the UFT-D.O.E. agreement is school integration and providing high-quality programs throughout the system, and in African American and Latino areas in particular. Racial exclusion from the elite high schools continues to fester. This year only seven black students were admitted to Stuyvesant High School based on the SHSAT exam scores. Similarly, only 9% of the test-based specialized high schools admissions were black and Hispanic students, who make up two-thirds of NYC public school students overall. New York continues to have the most segregated schools in the country. 

Class Struggle Education Workers has long called to integrate public schools, including by abolishing specialized and “gifted and talented” programs and providing quality education for all. Mayor Adams and his schools chancellor David Banks are hostile to school integration, claiming to promote “diversity” by expanding “G&T” programs. Yet the only mention of high-quality programs in the MoA is of more “virtual learning.” The CSEW has insisted that “remote education” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Education is social. Experience with remote classes in the pandemic showed that expanding these programs will increase racial/economic segregation. 

To provide sharply higher income for the lowest-paid D.O.E. employees, to provide the quality medical care, lower class size and fight for genuine integration and equality (rather than phony “diversity” and “equity”) will cost money. We demand results, how the bosses pay for it is their problem. But it is particularly obscene that the Adams administration has tried to cut school budgets at a time when city and state governments are swimming in money. New York City has a projected $4.9 billion surplus in the 2023 budget; New York State will have a $8.7 billion surplus in 2023; and as of 2022, over $4 billion of D.O.E. federal stimulus funds were unspent. 

The bottom line is that Adams and Hochul are enemies of public education. Both have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from billionaire backers of privatized charter schools. Adams raked in $7.7 million from wealthy donors in 2021, who expect a payback – and they’re getting it, as the ex-cop mayor takes aim at city labor. No surprises there. But the most treacherous role is played by the labor leaders who have fronted for the attacks on union gains by Wall Street and City Hall (sometimes united in a single person, as with billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg). 

Harry Nespoli of the Sanitation Workers, Henry Garrido of AFSCME District Council 37 and the UFT’s Mike Mulgrew head up the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) which designed the “Medicare Advantage” rip-off along with de Blasio and Adams. They are literally agents of the bosses in the unions – “labor lieutenants of capital,” in pioneering U.S. socialist Daniel De Leon’s memorable phrase – doing the employers’ dirty work by keeping the workers in check. DC 37’s Garrido set the 3% wage “hike” bandwagon in motion, which the UFT and now other city unions have hopped on in the name of “pattern bargaining.” But the most insidious of this trio is surely Mulgrew. 

The UFT chief has ambitions, he wants to “have a seat at the table” with the bosses, to have a hand in designing givebacks that gut union gains. And Mulgrew stands at the head of a well-oiled machine, a steamroller called “Unity.” It is vital to understand that sellouts like this UFT-D.O.E. deal are not due to personal corruption, but the product of a privileged petty-bourgeois bureaucratic layer that sits atop the unions, seeking to mediate between labor and capital. It was in top gear at the June 13 UFT D.A. After one semi-opposition speaker, the question was called, hundreds of “Unity” hands shot up in unison and the online vote to close debate was 1,287 to 285.

Teachers by themselves have limited economic leverage, as they don’t produce profit for the bosses. To win, educators must ally with sectors with the social/economic power to shut the city down. In New York City, that means joint strike action with Transport Workers Union Local 100, which runs the subways and buses, and all city workers. In that way, tens of thousands of education workers of the UFT and Professional Staff Congress (CUNY) – with the active participation of students and the working-class and oppressed communities that educators serve – can spark an upheaval that can shut the city down … and turn the Taylor Law into a dead letter.

Above all, a strike must be waged politically, which means taking on the Democratic Party. All of the leading players here – the governor, the mayor, educrats, City Council members and union leaders – are Democrats. And the ploys educators are facing were designed by Democrats: charter schools and Medicare Advantage are prime examples of the “public-private partnerships” pushed by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and kicked off under the Democratic Clinton administration. If things get sticky, as they did in the 2022 Chicago teachers strike, they will call in Democratic president Joe Biden, who last December pushed a law through the majority Democrat Congress imposing a sellout contract that railroad workers had voted against.

The Democratic Party is a party of capital, of Wall Street, of top industrialists and Big Tech, hedge fund operators and the rest of the capitalist parasites who live off the profits squeezed from the working people. The Democrats are strikebreakers, and war makers, pushing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and preparing for counterrevolutionary war against China, just as they initiated the anti-Soviet Cold War. To defeat them requires forging a leadership based on a program of intransigent class struggle, undertaking to build a revolutionary workers party to fight for a workers government. A “no” vote on the contract is the signal to “get ready to rumble!” ■

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed.  See the CSEW program here.