We’re not usually in the business of defending the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, but the attack he came under on Friday was something to behold. The president of the New York City Central Labor Council, Brian McLaughlin, speaking to a Midtown labor audience, upbraided Mr. Miller for having the audacity to allow the chairwoman of the education committee, Eva Moskowitz, to hold hearings regarding the teachers, principals, and custodians contracts. “Those hearings were an insult to the entire labor movement,” Mr. McLaughlin said. He also said he looked forward to the day “where our City Council leadership does not allow hearings that attack working people and interfere with the collective bargaining process.”

Well, even if Mr. Miller had blocked Ms. Moskowitz, the Court of Appeals was there with its own spotlight last week. The state’s highest court on Thursday issued an opinion that once again threw into sharp relief the problem at the core of the collective bargaining system that steers our city’s schools. In United Federation of Teachers v. Board of Education, it decided that an arbitrator was within her rights to force a principal to hire a specific teacher for a job in an after-school reading program — based solely on that teacher’s seniority.

Testifying a week earlier before the City Council’s education committee, the president of the UFT, Randi Weingarten, complained at length of the supposed abuse teachers receive at the hands of the Department of Education. “Teachers are demeaned, stripped of their professionalism, and expected to behave like robots incapable of independent thought,” she said. But it’s hard to see how Ms. Weingarten’s words aren’t a more accurate description of the situation of the principal of P.S. 173, who was at the center of last week’s decision.

All the way back in 1998 (yes, people have been spending time and money fighting over this for five years), the principal of P.S. 173 had to fill six openings in a program called Project Read. The positions were advertised as having a preference for teachers holding “Early Childhood/Reading License[s].” Of the six teachers the principal selected for a position in Project Read, two had the preferred licenses. The remaining four did not. And that’s where the trouble started.

Choosing among a number of teachers without the preferred licenses, the principal of P.S. 173 made the grievous mistake of failing to make his choice solely on the basis of seniority. Instead, he picked the candidates he thought would do the best job. This led Linda Feil, one of the passed-over applicants, to sue. Two of the teachers given the jobs had more seniority than Ms. Feil, but two had less. Ms. Feil filed a grievance. Eventually, an arbitrator decided that the principal’s decision had been “arbitrary,” since the principal couldn’t produce “documentary evidence” that the teachers he selected were better. The arbitrator awarded the after-school position and back pay to Ms. Feil.

Thursday’s Court of Appeals decision confirmed that the arbitrator was within the law in her decision. There’s little reason to think that the court’s decision is wrong on the law. But it does confirm one other thing: If any group is turned into “robots” in our system, it is the principals who have such minimal control over the management of their staffs. The principal of P.S. 173 did not want to fill a position by adding up certificates plus seniority and arriving at the solution to the contract’s equation. But he, and the rest of us, learned what’s possible under the UFT contract. Neither Mr. Miller nor Mr. McLaughlin can shield this spectacle from the public eye.