May 20, 2025

UFT Elections: In-Bureaucrats vs. Out-Bureaucrats and Wannabe Bureaucrats

Needed: A Class-Struggle Opposition of Education 
Workers  to Fight Trump’s Wrecking Ball Attack on Public Education

UFT Elections: In-Bureaucrats vs. Out-Bureaucrats and Wannabe Bureaucrats

May 20, 2025

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

This Spring the United Federation of Teachers is holding elections for president and other union-wide officers, executive board members and convention delegates. The contending slates are: first, the Unity caucus, which is the bureaucracy that has run the UFT uninterruptedly since it was formed in 1960, running Mike Mulgrew for reelection as president. It is facing two challengers with nearly indistinguishable programs: ABC (A Better Contract), running Amy Arundel for president, and ARISE (Alliance of Retired and In-Service Educators), whose candidate for president is Olivia Swisher. The opposition slates are for a more democratic union, more “transparency,” no more back room deals, etc. But at bottom, they and the Unity leadership all work within the framework of business unionism, or simple trade-unionism in the confines of capitalism, they are all beholden to the capitalist Democratic Party, and all that is a program for defeat.

Unity, of course, is responsible for the string of sellout contracts in recent decades. In 2005, it gave up seniority transfers in exchange for a piddling 15% raise, creating the Absent Teacher Reserve of educators without assigned positions. In 2014, it undercut health care by introducing copays and siphoning over $1 billion from the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund to pay for raises and bonuses. In 2018 it promised $600 million yearly in perpetuity in “savings” from health care to pay for “raises” below the rate of inflation, and in 2022 it tried to impose a switch from Medicare to private “Medicare Advantage” on retirees, who tenaciously resisted. The starting wage of teachers has fallen sharply due to 23% inflation since 2020. Today ABC wants a “better contract,” but its leader is a former Unity bureaucrat co-responsible for those rotten deals.

The components of ARISE – Retiree Advocate, the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators and the New Action caucus – opposed the last contract, but their platform, like those of all the slates – is a long list of positions (“combat racism,” etc.) and general pledges (“restore and improve healthcare benefits”) that few would object to, without specific demands or indicating how these would be won. Saying “We need more, not less!” is not a program for struggle. ARISE makes a nod to being “strike-ready for the next contract negotiations,” but doesn’t say we will actually have to strike, or what the obstacles are. Yet we are under attack not just by Trump Republicans in the White House and Congress but also by Democrats in City Hall and the Statehouse, and none of the slates are prepared to fight the capitalist attack on public education.

Just look at where the slates stand on the issues facing educators today. Begin with the shameful poverty pay for the 24,000 paraprofessionals, whose starting salary is still under $32,000 a year. In the 2022 UFT-NYCDOE contract, which sold out the entire membership with “raises” that were actually a pay cut, the Unity leadership threw paras under bus. Now it is pushing a bill in the City Council for a $10,000 annual payment to paras, which would be a step forward, but would not count toward pensions. ABC and ARISE both call vaguely for a “living wage” for paraprofessionals. But what does that mean concretely? We say the UFT should demand that the “bonus” be included in their base salary, and if the bill isn’t passed by the first day of school in September, the union should walk out until paras get their pay.

Another immediate issue is pension reform. Teachers covered by Tier IV of the New York City Teachers Retirement System are eligible to retire at age 55 with 30 years’ service. But for those hired from 2012 on, Tier VI was instituted by Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo to require that teachers work until age 63 before they can retire with full pension, with drastic reductions for early retirement and as much as doubling teachers’ contributions. ABC, ARISE and Unity all call to “fix Tier Six.” But how exactly? All look to lobbying state legislators, i.e., pressuring the Democrats in Albany. Lack of decent retirement pay is a problem for working people throughout the U.S. Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT calls to use union power to fight for Tier IV and more for all – and full pensions for everyone nationwide.

A burning issue in NYC schools is class size. All the slates are for the New York state class-size law. But until this year, the NYC Department of Education and the mayor, Eric Adams, who opposed the law, have continuously tried to undercut it, putting off actual reductions. Now the D.O.E. says it will hire an additional 3,700 teachers for the next school year, when its own plan says 20,000 more are needed. It highlights nine school buildings that are opening, but says nothing about schools at max capacity because of “collocated” charter schools. UFT president Mike Mulgrew even OKed waivers for schools that don’t have space! ARISE and ABC talk of changing contract language … in 2027. We say the UFT should mobilize to enforce the class size limits in every school from the first day of school! And to free up space, kick out charter schools – end co-locations!

Class Struggle Education Workers at International 
Longshoremen's Strike in Newark, October 2024. 

To achieve any of these goals, the union will have to confront head-on the New York State Taylor Law, which outlaws strikes by public sector workers in exchange for state-regulated “collective bargaining.” In fact, all three slates accept this anti-union law. Mulgrew and the Unity bureaucracy hide behind the Taylor Law, using it to ban any move for a strike. Both ABC and ARISE call to amend it. ABC calls for “lobbying for a pro-union amendment to the Taylor Law that allows us to be fully action-ready – including the option to legally strike, if necessary.” ARISE  calls to “support current legislative efforts to amend the Taylor Law to be more union friendly.” Yet the purpose of the law is to ban strikes and chain public sector unions to the state, it can’t be amended to make it “more union-friendly.”

Class Struggle Education Workers says unions must not be bound by anti-labor laws, or beg the bosses for permission to engage in strikes, occupations or other effective labor tactics. The Taylor Law must be shredded by militant strike action, just as its predecessor, the 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act, was ripped up by the powerful 1966 NYC transit strike. And to do so, it’s necessary to bring the power of the heavy hitters of New York labor to bear. The UFT alongside the TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100 and other city workers unions must be prepared to truly shut New York City down. Otherwise, calls for better working conditions, higher wages, lower class sizes, etc. will come to naught.

Another key issue is mayoral control. Mayoral dictatorship through the NYC Department of Education (D.O.E.) was instituted by billionaire Michael Bloomberg in 2002, with the support of the UFT under Randi Weingarten. Unity’s Mulgrew says he wants to make changes in the composition of the mayor-controlled Panel for Education Policy to make it “more representative.” ABC wants to “end unilateral mayoral control.” To replace it with what? Elected school boards? All around the country big money has poured in to buy school board elections. ARISE calls to “replace mayoral control and ensure decision-making is more inclusive of all stakeholders.” Like Wall Street hedge funds that have a huge stake in charter schools? Less “unilateral,” “more representative,” “more inclusive” – these sound bites all duck the issue, namely capitalist control of education.

Charter schools are the spearhead of the attack on public education by the forces of capital. Both Republicans and Democrats have supported these union-busting outfits that siphon off money and space from public schools for privately managed “academies.” None of the three slates even mention charters. It appears they have dropped this issue which was the focus of huge battles in the past. ABC and ARISE have some vague rhetoric against privatization, but no specifics. Class Struggle Education Workers calls for expropriation of all private schools as well as semi-privatized charter schools and their inclusion in the public school system. The CSEW is for the abolition of mayoral control and for democratic control of the schools by educator-led assemblies of teachers, students, parents and workers.

This issue came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic when teachers unions around the U.S. pushed to keep the schools closed. The M.O.R.E. caucus demanded that schools remain closed until there was a 0% infection rate, even after vaccines became available, demonstrating with child-size coffins and signs saying “I won’t die for the D.O.E.” This disastrous policy was deeply harmful to kids confined to home and used by right-wingers to bash teachers unions. The CSEW fought, uniquely, from July 2020 on, to use union power to reopen schools safely. We declared: “Where Pandemic Is Raging, Keep Schools Closed – For Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker Control” but “Where Infection Rate Is Low, Schools Should Reopen Safely with Billions for Sanitation & Ventilation, Triple Classrooms Now, No Hiring Freeze, Hire Thousands.”[1]

 

While many teachers unions and union opposition groups called to keep schools closed during the COVID 19 pandemic, Class Struggle Education Workers called to use union power to keep schools open where infection rates were low, and spelled out how to do that. Above: at demonstration called by M.O.R.E. outside UFT headquarters, January 2022. 

We also called for union-led committees of teachers, students, parents and workers to bring in independent ventilation experts to inspect school buildings to make sure they are safe.[2] This was a program for direct union action, and where we were in a position to do so (e.g., at the City University of New York), CSEW supporters initiated and participated in such committees. That is what a real class-struggle union leadership would fight for, and do.

Today, the Trump government is enacting policies threatening our  undocumented and immigrant students, families and staff members with mass deportations, including targeting birthright citizenship, a gain won by the Civil War. Supporters of the CSEW in New York City public schools have called for local UFT chapters to initiate school-based committees to defend immigrants, which may include and work with other unions, students, parents and community members. And we have carried this out, with functioning committees in several schools in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. We have also called on the UFT and other unions to independently mobilize labor’s power to defend immigrants and to declare, “We will not let them take our students.”

ARISE talks about expanding “bottom-up restorative justice and conflict resolution programs,” but neither it nor ABC or Unity call for police out of the schools. School safety agents, who are part of the NYPD, are certainly not going to stop ICE agents from snatching our students, especially after ex-cop Mayor Adams sent out a memorandum in January stating that city employees should let federal immigration authorities enter a school building, even if they don’t have a judicial warrant, if the I.C.E. cops insist. Moreover, having cops in schools only further perpetuates the school-to-prison pipeline. The UFT should also defend cafeteria workers and other staff, as well as school bus drivers and attendants who may be at risk from I.C.E., and support their fight for greatly improved pay and working conditions.

Although the UFT election campaign is at bottom a fight between in-bureaucrats, out-bureaucrats and wannabe bureaucrats, with few fundamental differences, they are all playing dirty in a political knife fight. Unity has engaged in vile red-baiting and “outsider”-baiting, putting out a leaflet at the January Delegate Assembly equating ARISE and M.O.R.E. with the Democratic Socialists of America. At the same D.A. it introduced a resolution declaring “individuals, groups, or organizations that do not have membership in the UFT, should not be allowed to interfere in the UFT’s elections” (see box). At the May D.A., the person motivating the motion called on delegates to “stand with me if you believe UFT is for UFT members” and vote “yes.” This was a threat to dissidents and a loyalty oath for Unity supporters.

ABC, for its part, sued the UFT over election procedures! This is a bald-faced betrayal, crossing the class line: it is a matter of principle to never go to the bosses’ courts against a union. Labor must clean its own house! ARISE, meanwhile, decided to put forward a “Hands Off Our Schools” resolution, which it negotiated with Unity, that lifted the call in our supporter’s motion for school-based committees, but gave it an opposite political content. Where our supporter’s motion said such committees should be to “defend immigrants” and called for labor to “mobilize its power,” the ARISE resolution called for committees to defend public education generally, in a campaign to “culminate in a series of actions with congressional electeds.” Instead of a call for class struggle, it was a call for class collaboration with the Democratic Party.

After the election, the Unity bureaucracy will continue back-room deals with the Democrats, to save the city money. Next up: in-service health care. If a court rules in favor of imposing Medicare Disadvantage on retirees, the UFT and other city unions should strike to stop it. If by some fluke an opposition slate should win, Delegate Assembly meetings might be a tad more democratic – wouldn’t be hard – but they would do the same kind of deals, perhaps with a show of member participation. Why? Because (a) that’s the way it’s done under capitalism, and they all play by the rules; and (b) they all accept responsibility for the finances of the capitalist rulers. The CSEW says instead that we should break with the Democrats and Republicans, and all capitalist parties, and build a class-struggle workers party to fight for a workers government. 

Mike Mulgrew’s Red-Baiting Motion Against “Outside Organizations”

In the run-up to the Spring UFT elections, at the January Delegate Assembly the perpetually ruling Unity caucus launched a red-baiting smear of the opposition M.O.R.E. (Movement of Rank-and-file Educators) caucus and the ARISE slate, putting forward a “Resolution on Union Interference: Interference in the UFT’s election from non-members (individuals and outside organizations).” At the May D.A. where it was voted on, the Unity presenter asked delegates to stand and be counted to show loyalty to the bureaucratic machine. The motions passed by a 2-1 margin, showing that Unity still has a lock on the D.A. This despicable motion was a threat to the democratic rights of all UFT members, and a throwback to the late-1940s “red purges” that gutted militant unions and destroyed the Teachers Union in NYC at the start of the Cold War.

This crude display of McCarthyism is hardly surprising coming from the UFT bureaucracy, which was founded by social democrat Albert Shanker and other followers of Max Shachtman, a renegade from Trotskyism and arch red-baiter. It also shows that Unity is still smarting (and panicking) after losing to the Retiree Advocate slate (now part of ARISE) in last year’s elections in the Retired Teacher Chapter. Suddenly there were 300 opposition delegates in the D.A. Mulgrew was forced to backpedal on his attempt to force retirees off traditional Medicare onto a “Medicare Advantage” scheme, which would save the city $600 million a year by cutting back on retiree health benefits. (The issue is still before a court, and although Mulgrew says he no longer supports it, he hasn’t withdrawn the UFT “friend of the court” brief backing it.)

Mulgrew sought to whip up the bureaucracy’s conservative base against the ARISE election slate, whose supporters are generally aligned with more liberal and “progressive” Democrats, while Unity prefers more “moderate” Democrats. At the January D.A., while the motion against “interference” in the union by non-members was being introduced inside, outside Unity was distributing a scurrilous leaflet headlined “? DSA = MORE = ARISE ?” equating the opposition groups with the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America. Unity cited a five-month-old article on the Politico news site, “Democratic Socialists Look to Take Over New York’s Powerful Trade Unions” (14 August 2024), which cited an internal DSA memo on getting hired into union jobs in NYC and joining M.O.R.E. This is a crime? Only to die-hard red-hunters.

The Unity leaflet accuses the DSA of “infiltrating” unions to “advance their own agendas,” saying that it is “imperative that our union elections remain free from external interference.” Hello? Mike Mulgrew himself is a conduit for the influence of an “external entity,” namely the Democratic Party which governs New York and whose agenda he carried out in pushing the Medicare Advantage scheme which first originated with Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio. Revealed! Mulgrew ran for delegate at the last three Democratic National Conventions in support of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, imperialist ruling class politicians who upheld Barack Obama’s agenda of corporate education “reform,” charter schools and “merit pay.” AFT president Randi Weingarten is a longtime influential member of the Democratic National Committee.

The “now infamous” DSA memo was incredibly dumb and speaks volumes about the actual outlook of many of their members: “DSA members interested in working in education should think hard about how they will relate to and work with student populations that are predominantly non-White, and should also consider how they will work with teachers of color”), but nothing more. The pale pink DSA, which is part of the Democratic Party of Gaza genocide, racist repression and imperialist war, hardly “undermines our democratic principles” or “suppresses the authentic voice of the members” in the interests of a “broader political agenda.” Mulgrew somehow knows that the “authentic voice” of teachers is to support Unity’s “narrower” agenda of collaborating with the NYC Department of Education (and their bosses in the city and state governments) to suppress the struggle of teachers to defend and improve public schools and their own conditions.

Class Struggle Education Workers says: No to the Unity witch-hunting motion! Break with the Democrats, Republicans and all the bosses’ parties! For a class-struggle workers party!■


[2] In this emergency situation, the CSEW made detailed demands for frequent testing by union safety committees, for MERV 13 air filters in all schools and portable HEPA air cleaners, rebuilding bathrooms, enforcing class sizes of no more than 10-15 students, and massive hiring to make that possible.

Class Struggle Education Workers is an organization, fraternally linked to the Internationalist Group, of union and non-unionized activists in all aspects of education fighting 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. The struggle for students’ and educators’ rights, and mobilization against the genocidal war on the Palestinians continues. If you are interested in joining these efforts, contact the CSEW at cs_edworkers@hotmail.com.  ■