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.

Read the full leaflet at Class Struggle Education Workers.

Submitted July 01, 2023 at 06:12AM by a_indabronx https://ift.tt/4npLdoU