Liberal Powerplays Take Center Stage as Legal Battle Grows Between Mamdani, City Council Over Pay Bumps for Teachers’ Aides

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is in a “quagmire” of his own creation, the New York City Council said in a legal filing Thursday, after he first advocated for pay bumps for public school aides, then withdrew his support for the move, and finally failed to veto the bill when lawmakers took matters into their own hands.The Council is calling on the court to toss a lawsuit brought by the Mayor’s Office and uphold Local Law 129, which lawmakers approved in July and is currently on track to award up to $10,000 to each of the city’s “unconscionably” underpaid paraprofessionals who help students with disabilities. Salaries for the posts currently begin around $32,000.“We didn’t want this legal battle,” Council Speaker Julie Menin said in an X post Thursday. “But in the absence of action by mayoral administrations, the City Council was obligated to authorize one-time stabilization payments to stem the tide of paraprofessionals leaving our schools.”The mayor’s office has had the opportunity to fix paraprofessional pay every four years when city officials sit down for contract negotiations with the United Federation of Teachers union, the council said, but those talks have instead led to an “educational and fiscal emergency,” as paraprofessionals abandon their posts in search of better paying work. The staff shortage leaves schools unable to meet their students’ needs and cost the city over $1 billion in settlements last year.Mr. Mamdani’s lawsuit opposing the City Council’s so-called “RESPECT checks” marks a battle over paraprofessional pay that has been overshadowed by power grabs and influence campaigns, and threatens to leave a critical workforce no better off than before.A Mayoral Bait-and-SwitchOn the campaign trail last summer, Mr. Mamdani won the endorsement of the union that represents about 200,000 current and former educators, administrators and support staff across the five boroughs, the United Federation of Teachers, in part because he supported the plan to funnel up to $325 million sourced from city coffers outside the UFT-negotiated payrolls.Accepting the endorsement at a rally on July 9, 2025, the now-mayor pledged to support the RESPECT check bill, which was then pending before City Council. The proposal “addresses the fact that there are too many open positions right now for paraprofessionals across the city because that job simply does not pay enough,” Mr. Mamdani said at the time.Recent rounds of bargaining have led to a widening gap between teachers and paraprofessionals, whose currently earn less than many local fast food workers.Soon after taking office, though, the Mamdani administration started to change its tune. In March the first deputy commissioner for the Mayor’s Office of Labor Relations, Daniel Pollak, told the council City Hall had “significant legal, practical, and fairness concerns” about the bill.One year after accepting the UFT’s endorsement, Mr. Mamdani spoke against the paraprofessional bonuses the day City Council voted 49-0 to hand them out. Emphasizing the importance of paraprofessionals, whose work he called “critical” the mayor told reporters “I believe that this is a matter that is best treated at the bargaining table, and we will see what the City Council does, but those are my thoughts on that.” He refused to sign the bill, but since it passed with such strong support, he couldn’t veto it. The bill lapsed into law while he was on vacation, and the Mayor’s Office and Department of Education filed a lawsuit to block it that day, saying the paraprofessional pay bill “ignores nearly sixty years of well-established collective bargaining process under the Taylor Law,” a state law that mandates compensation be addressed through collective bargaining.“By circumventing that process and attempting to increase pay for school paraprofessionals by legislative fiat” the complaint states, “the Council has set a perilous and unlawful precedent with huge fiscal consequences for the DOE and the City — and, by extension, the tax-paying public.”A Union Boss Losing GroundIf Mr. Mamdani’s position has been inconsistent, he at least appears to have circled back around to the organized labor principles of his Democratic Socialist party’s agenda. Meanwhile, the man tasked with that organizing on behalf of paraprofessionals, Mr. Mulgrew, has used the $10,000 City Council-approved payouts as something of a diversion from a problem that festered under his watch.The UFT officially launched its “RESPECT” campaign to boost paraprofessional pay in November 2024, four months after Mr. Mulgrew’s Unity caucus lost eight leadership slots within the union’s paraprofessional chapter. That vote followed the third round of collective bargaining between the city and the teacher’s union under Mr. Mulgrew’s leadership, which resulted in 3 percent annual raises across the union’s rank and file. “We tried to get this passed in the budget. Couldn’t get it in the budget,” Mr. Mulgrew told paraprofessionals at a Town Hall meeting celebrating the passage of the RESPECT check bill in July. “Pattern bargaining has been the problem since the very start of this. The City and its bureaucratic agencies use pattern bargaining to abuse its workers.”While Mr. Mulgrew has repeatedly blamed the city’s preference for across-the-board percentage-based pay increases for leaving paraprofessional with wages that don’t rise to the cost of living, opponents within the union say he had more than $450 million to hand out after the last round of bargaining and chose to issue small annual retention bonuses to each member across the rank and file instead of prioritizing paraprofessionals.In audio from the UFT’s March 2023 Delegate Assembly obtained by The New York Sun, Mr. Mulgrew can be heard discussing an “equity fund” included in the contract under negotiation by District Council 37, the city’s largest public sector union. That union set aside $70 million to raise compensation for hard-to-fill positions under its control.Rather than go that route, Mr. Mulgrew “unilaterally” decided to allot retention bonuses of about $1,100 to “sell” the new contract, with its low 3 percent annual raises, to his members, according to middle school special education teacher Dan Alicea, who was on the UFT bargaining committee.“That’s great,” Mr. Alicea said of the extra income. Nevertheless, he said, “$1,100 to me is a little bit different to $1,100 to someone who’s making $33,000 a year.” In another Delegate Assembly recording, Mr. Mulgrew dismisses a proposal to establish a UFT paraprofessional equity fund.“Everybody is aware of the disparities that we have because of percentage bargaining,” Mr. Mulgrew said. “But thankfully, unlike other unions, who might create equity funds, we actually get our money to our folks.”The Sun reached out to the UFT with questions about the union’s plan to improve paraprofessional pay under its next contract as the current one expires next year. UFT Deputy Press Secretary Alison Gendar noted that the previous union contract in 2019 included a base pay increase for paraprofessionals that was higher than the pattern bargaining percentage teachers received.“Both mayor Mamdani and UFT President Michael Mulgrew have said publicly that there are on-going talks about ways the workforce stabilization payment could be brought into the para’s UFT contract,” Ms. Gendar said in an emailed statement.A Council Speaker on the MoveMs. Menin, who was elected Speaker in January, was instrumental in getting the revised bill across the line, after an initial attempt stalled last year.“I pushed to address this during the budget process, but the administration failed to make this workforce a priority both in its budget and at the bargaining table,” Ms. Menin said in a statement to Chalkbeat this summer.Ms. Menin has repeatedly cited the eye-watering sums the city pays out annually to settle so-called “Carter cases” brought by parents of disabled children who say they must enroll in private schools because the city cannot meet their needs.Carter case payouts have grown from $47 million in 2005 to $1.3 billion last year, eating 3.25 percent of the New York City Department of Education’s budget, according to the Manhattan Institute. The millions required to give each paraprofessional an extra $10,000, and thereby hopefully, fill their ranks and keep more kids in public school, offers the city a comparative savings, according to proponents of the legislation.Supporting the bill as the mayor backed away also left Ms. Menin standing as the UFT’s champion in the legal fight over the legislation, which the union is currently seeking to join in the City Council’s corner.Ms. Menin, a three-time city commissioner who also chaired Community Board 1 and oversaw Census operations in the city before ascending to City Council, will be out of a job when her current term ends in 2029. With more than two decades in city government under her belt, chances seem remote that retirement will follow. Indeed, while the litigation was unfolding last month, Ms. Menin registered a political action committee with the state’s Board of Elections. Ms. Menin previously leveraged contributions to her fellow council members in her run for speaker.Her former opponent in her last City Council campaign, current New York State Senate GOP candidate Alina Bonsell, surmised that the strong support for the paraprofessional RESPECT checks within the chamber may have constrained Ms. Menin to stick with it, even as the mayor threatened to sue.“At the same time, I do believe there may be truth to the speculation that she is positioning herself for her next move, potentially the U.S. Senate,” Ms. Bonsell said in a statement. “Support from the teachers’ union would certainly be valuable in such a race.”A representative for Ms. Menin did not respond to queries from The New York Sun.Ms. Bonsell said she was “pleased” to see the speaker taking on the mayor, after staying very quiet during his candidacy.“If Julie can help paraprofessionals while also helping herself politically, good for her,” Ms. Bonsell continued. “And if she chooses to run for the U.S. Senate, I would rather see Julie Menin win than AOC. Frankly, I think Julie would do a better job representing New York than Chuck Schumer has.”

Liberal Powerplays Take Center Stage as Legal Battle Grows Between Mamdani, City Council Over Pay Bumps for Teachers’ Aides

Liberal Powerplays Take Center Stage as Legal Battle Grows Between Mamdani, City Council Over Pay Bumps for Teachers’ Aides

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