Weingarten Calls On Bloomberg To Return to Talks

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The president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, called on Mayor Bloomberg yesterday to resume contract negotiations immediately for the city’s 83,000 teachers following the release of an arbitration panel’s recommendations that include increasing teacher salaries by 11.4%.


Teachers have entered their third year without a contract, and both the union and the administration have indicated they were waiting for the state labor panel’s nonbinding recommendations, a document delivered to both parties on Monday, before proceeding.


“I’m shocked that they haven’t called to say let’s sit down, let’s try to interpret it, let’s try to figure out where we go from here,” Ms. Weingarten said last night on her way into Washington Irving High School for a meeting. “I have not heard from them other than them saying, ‘We’re still talking amongst ourselves.’ So clearly, they don’t even want to give us the respect of getting back to the negotiating table and seeing if this can be used as a way of shaping an agreement.”


Despite an embargo, the union, the United Federation of Teachers, posted the report on its Web site last night. The document was not supposed to be released until Saturday. It was first reported in yesterday’s New York Times and Daily News.


The recommendations also include extending the school day by 10 minutes, awarding teachers back pay ranging from $1,717 to $3,509 based on seniority, and requiring the dismissal of any teacher found to have had a sexual relationship with a student or another minor. Any teacher wrongly accused of sexually abusing children would be fully reinstated.


The panel, rather than siding entirely with either party, struck a balance in recommending changes to both salaries and work rules. Officials of both the union and the administration said the recommendations had aspects they liked and ones they disliked.


The union asked the state’s Public Employment Relations Board to get involved in December when formal negotiations reached an impasse. The teachers have been working without a contract since May 31, 2003.


The raises recommended by the panel would lift the salary for a first-year teacher to $43,437 from $39,000. A teacher with five years’ experience and 30 credits above a master’s degree would go to $56,610 from $50,828. The maximum salary would be raised to $90,473 from $81,232.


Teachers would start receiving the entire increase November 1.


The contract spans the period between June 1, 2003, when the old contract expired, and next June 30. The panel recommended raises of 2% after the first year, 3.5% at the end of the second year, and 5.5% halfway through the third year, in which classes began last week. The cumulative value of the raises was put at 11.4%.


The city has proposed a total increase of 4.17%. The union has sought an increase that adds up to 19.1%.


In one of the recommendations that touched on management prerogatives, seniority transfers, a system in which the vast majority of positions held by first-year teachers are considered vacancies and can be snapped up by other teachers with more seniority, would be halted.


Performance-based pay for teachers, especially those in high-need schools, would be implemented as a pilot program. The merit pay would be based on school-wide performance.


And the panel recommended abandoning a current policy that allows teachers to invoke arbitration for disciplinary letters that principals put in their personnel files. The panel called the process “a very significant waste of time, effort, and resources.”


The last time the state board got involved in a fight between the UFT and the city was in 2002. At that time, the fact-finding panel ended the dispute between Mr. Bloomberg and the union.


“The last time the fact-finding award came out, within 24 hours both of us had signaled that even though we had reservations with it, we would both be willing to use it as a basis,” Ms. Weingarten said.


Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday he had just received the report and was still studying it, but he expressed concerns about how the city would finance the recommended raises.


“We talk to the UFT virtually every day and have been for a long time, and I remain optimistic that we will come to an agreement,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “The problem we have is we’d like to pay our teachers a lot more, but the city has deficits looming, starting fiscal year ’07.”


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