New Contract Gives a Win To Teachers

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The New York Sun

Teachers appear to be the all-out winners in a tentative new labor contract with the city announced Monday, a surprising turnaround after the bitterness of past contract negotiations that has left experts scratching their heads at the mayor’s motives.

“Once this contract is done, what leverage does the mayor have at this point?” a senior researcher at the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern, said. “He can’t unilaterally do anything.”

In the new contract, reached nearly a year ahead of the current contract’s expiration in October 2007, teachers would get a 7.1% total raise over two years, including a $750 lump sum in January 2007, with no concessions. In the last contract, which was settled two and half years late, teachers agreed to work longer days in exchange for a raise that was applied retroactively.

Some experts hypothesized that the mayor’s agreeableness was calculated to convince the president of the teacher’s union, Randi Weingarten, to help him cut back on health benefits and pensions for all city workers. In addition to leading the United Federation of Teachers, Ms. Weingarten is head of the Municipal Labor Committee, a body that negotiates the benefits and pensions for all municipal workers separately from their regular union contracts. Mr. Bloomberg has been pushing for a reduction in health and pension payments.

“Those two things will be easier to do with the contract done, they’ll be done in a less rancorous and more professional environment,” a former special adviser to the mayor, Ester Fuchs, who is now a public affairs professor at Columbia University, said.

She also referred to Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Weingarten’s common goal to settle the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit and persuade state officials to send the city more education aid.

“The city has enormous battles which are critical to mayor’s success in transformation of the city,” Ms. Fuchs said. “There’s a lot more room to do both of those negotiations now.”

The research director of the Citizens Budget Commission, Charles Brecher, who advocates for restraint in government spending, was mystified, however, at what he perceived as the mayor’s weakness in the face of the union’s demands.

“This makes no sense to us from a managerial perspective,” he said. “If he’s trying to do this to link it to health insurance, he’s doing it backwards. When you’re negotiating with somebody, you don’t settle one and then hope you get the other one later.”

At the late night, surprise announcement of the deal, both the mayor and Ms. Weingarten touched only briefly on the possibility of cutting spending on health benefits and pensions.

“They really are separate,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Mr. Brecher is also concerned that the teachers’ victory could force the city to make future concessions when other union contracts come up for negotiation.

However, the editor of the Chief-Leader, a weekly newspaper for civil service employees, Richard Steier, said the teachers’ contract might help the mayor reach favorable deals with other unions. He referred to ongoing negotiations with the police union, which has been demanding raises of 5% a year. In its first year, the teacher’s contract calls for only a 2% raise.

“This becomes a way of squeezing them a little more,” Mr. Steier said.

For members of the principals union, which has been trying to negotiate a contract for three years, the deal for teachers was more like a slap in the face. If the new contract is ratified, some teachers could potentially make more money than their supervisors. In a letter, the president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, Jill Levy, consoled members that she wrote must feel a “sense of rejection and disrespect from the Chancellor and Mayor.”

She added: “I do believe that we will ultimately have a contract comparable to the people we supervise.”

Other experts wonder if the mayor is looking further ahead. Though the mayor has responded coyly in the past when reporters have asked him if he plans on running for president in 2008, Mr. Stern noted that the smooth negotiations with teachers could burnish the national image he has cultivated as an education reformer.

“He wants to have all these labor negotiations behind him, and he’s already been touring the country,” Mr. Stern said. “As far as the country’s concerned he’s already accomplished a lot.”

Ms. Fuchs dismissed much of the speculation into the mayor’s ulterior motives. The best theory, she said, was simple goodwill.

“I think this was the mayor’s way of acknowledging the teachers’ role in improving the New York City’s public schools,” she said. “I really think this is coming from a good place. Having this behind them is such a huge win for everybody and it’s going to help the performance of the teachers at the end of the day.”


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