New Action – UFT

Earlier this summer, our union membership ratified most of the contracts that we’d been negotiating with the City. As we all know, one bargaining unit voted no on theirs, and the response from UFT leadership was nothing short of disappointing. Put briefly, UFT/Unity delivered the ‘news’ that the City simply wasn’t interested in renegotiating, encouraged an email campaign to conduct a ‘revote’ rather than work to renegotiate, scheduled a summer revote against the wishes of elected rank-and-file leadership, and tore apart a non-Unity-led chapter for political gain in the process. But, this article isn’t about the OT/PT chapter; this article is about everyone else.

Members may remember that at the end of the year, we were rushed into the ratification process for a contract that the negotiating committee, executive board, and delegate assembly had no chance to review. At all three of those meetings, a conspicuously staged platform of cringe-worthy obsequiousness from Unity members that even seemed to make UFT leadership blush was aired to confused attendees. That obsequiousness was coupled with merciless dues-funded heckling of anyone in opposition, myself included. On the practical side, summer, we were told, would force us to vote immediately (something the OT/PT revote–to take place in August–disproves, but I digress). And so, those three bodies moved to go forward with the ratification process, without an MOA in hand. To be sure, it was later released to membership for review – albeit with far less time to read the fine print than is typical for union contract votes. 

What members may also remember is that, mere days before being jolted with the surprise of contract ratification, we were prepped by leadership to expect a pro-longed contract fight. Mulgrew had only just emailed us stating that “the city has shown us that they have zero respect for everything we have done as educators over the past three years and everything we continue to do each day.” What changed, just days later, when power-point in hand, our UFT president ran us through an ‘overly rosy’ sales-pitch telling us how good our contract was? After all, New Action analyzed the contract thoroughly, coming to a consensus that we’d be better off voting it down. No amount of distracting perks and Unity propaganda could make up for sub-inflation wage increases and obvious givebacks.

I’d like to offer that, in all likelihood, nothing—certainly nothing substantial—changed between Mulgrew’s email to us telling us we weren’t going to get a good deal and his power-point, just days later, telling us how good the deal was. I think, just as in the case of OT/PTs, Mulgrew heard the City say ‘no’ to our demands, and decided we should just take whatever deal they wanted. 

Don’t get me wrong: I was part of a negotiating subcommittee. I saw language written or suggested by rank-and-file members that ended up accepted, often in pared down form, and codified into the contract. But, these were all essentially minor, often lateral, changes to the MOA. On the contrary, when it came to major changes, we saw nothing where it was expected most – like in special education, where implicit leverage made our lack of gains incredibly disappointing. Negotiations, indeed, seemed cut drastically short. Whereas many of us expected to fight back against the City’s many ‘no’s’ at the bargaining table, we suddenly were called back to see a deal that barely had any of our demands met – with most of the major changes being ones that surely the employer must have asked for, not us. The ominous promise to create a system-wide virtual instruction network (and without codified class-size limits) is case in point. 

So did we really negotiate the best possible deal we could – or did we just accept the City’s offer? UFT/Unity’s deliverance of the message that the City doesn’t want to renegotiate the OT/PT deal, followed by its orchestration of a revote, makes one wonder what leverage we ever had at all with any of our conspicuously mediocre contracts. The other day, a reader of this blog commented that “Despite its storied history, UFT has now solidified its current form as little more than a corporate HR department.” With respect to UFT leadership at least, it’s hard to disagree. 

As strike-ready labor, such as UPS drivers, organize their way into making salaries competitive with our own, even without the expense of college degrees, we find ourselves peculiarly at a point much like we were at when the UFT was born. At that moment, with salaries trailing what was being made in factories, and with often horrendous working conditions that needed to be rectified, we made the decision to unionize – and for a long time, we organized and struck our way into teaching being a competitive job. But we gave up, giving in to concessionary business-style unionism;  and our losses are starting to ‘add up.’ It’s time, once again, to catch up with unionized labor around us. It’s time, quite frankly, to stop delivering ‘no’ messages from the employer and start being a union again.

This afternoon, UFT leadership decided that the OT/PT bargaining unit would be split up between those who voted no (OT/PTs) and those who voted yes (nurses, supervisors of OT/PTs, nurse supervisors, and audiologists). The subunits who already voted ‘yes’ will not get a revote. They will automatically get their contracts ratified, despite the initial bargaining unit voting ‘no.’ This includes nurses, who, incidentally, might have voted otherwise (‘no’) had they known that municipal hospital nurses would break the pattern and get pay parity with nurses in the private sector. School nurses, who will follow the UFT’s much touted ‘pattern,’ indeed, will now be amongst the lowest paid nurses in New York City. They will not get a revote. But, yes votes were never the issue to Unity. No votes were.

And indeed, with ‘no votes’ the issue, only those titles who voted ‘no,’ i.e. OT/PTs, will be given the ‘opportunity’ to do a revote. Despite voting 2/3s ‘no’ the first time around, they will be made to vote again- with the hope that they will vote yes this time around. The entire process will take place by mail, and will be completed in the month of August, when many members will be on vacation. Notably, the decision comes just after the OT/PT Executive Board voted overwhelmingly to not do a revote, but after hundreds of OT/PT members, mostly (but not entirely) members who had already voted yes or failed to vote the first time around, petitioned to overturn non-ratification by holding a revote

There’s a lot to unpack here, and while I won’t comment on the ‘reverse gerrymandering’ of the bargaining unit, there are many reasons that the ‘revote’ decision is problematic. After all, nothing about the contract has changed. It is just as bad as it was before. All that has changed, in fact, is that Mulgrew has conveyed that he won’t be able to do the job of renegotiating, especially in a timely manner. This is not a reason to revote on a contract – it’s a reason to get UFT leadership to do their job (or find someone else to take their place). 

Instead, UFT leadership decided to work with others in their caucus to divide the chapter, for political gain. After decimating the ‘unity’ of the chapter; after telling them that they were only going to get the City’s first deal, nothing better; after telling them that organizing was pointless; after aiding and publicizing a ‘revote’ campaign, which was deliberately politicized to scapegoat non-Unity OT/PT leadership for daring to think that organizing was worthwhile; after all this, Unity-aligned UFT leadership set up a situation where this time, they are much more likely to get that yes vote.

But mark my words – those new ‘yeses,’ if they come out that way, won’t be affirmations of the contract – they’ll be votes of no confidence in the ability of Mulgrew to do his job. 

Not only is this situation an insult to OT/PTs, who deserved better but were stomped down and told they wouldn’t get it no matter how hard they tried; this is an insult to unionism in general. It is clear now that UFT leadership was never in the business, this contract season, of more than uncritically communicating messages from the City/DOE and doing whatever they could to get membership to agree with taking less. This situation is case and point. Now we know that if we ever vote that the City hasn’t done enough – that we deserve better, like nurses in public hospitals deserved better – now we know what the Unity-led leadership will do: whatever it takes to dismantle democracy and avoid ‘doing the work.’

The full email from UFT leadership follows: 

“Thank you to those who attended our meeting last week concerning a revote of your chapter’s contract. After looking into the details of how to break up the bargaining unit, we can now announce that we will move forward with the split within the next week. 

In the past several weeks there has been an outpouring of opinion from your chapter concerning the idea of a revote. We weighed all sides of the arguments and took everything into consideration including the fact that the Supervisors of Nurses and Therapists, Audiologists and School Nurses are officially being removed from your contract. The OT/PT chapter will now stand alone and, as a result, the situation has changed significantly. We now feel strongly about having a revote only for your chapter. The other three groups already ratified in the original vote in June so there is no reason for them to revote. Please note that the result of your chapter’s revote – no matter the outcome – will be final.

We met with the American Arbitration Association to discuss the voting process and determined that the ballots will be mailed on Tuesday, Aug. 8, and will be due Aug. 29. They will be counted on Aug. 30. Additional voting instructions will be mailed with your ballot.

We recognize that some members may be away for the summer vacation. If this applies to you, you can provide us with a summer address that is different from your home address by contacting our election coordinator, Yasmin Colon (ycolon@uft.org), and we will have the ballot sent to that address. 

We will also have a dedicated hotline for anyone who needs help with the revoting process. Please call 212-331-6310 if you need assistance at any point. 

Again, thank you for speaking out to make your voices heard.

Sincerely,

Michael Mulgrew”

This week, we learned that a municipal union finally beat the DC37 pattern – indeed, they beat it by a substantial margin – roughly double. Nurses working in NYC’s municipal hospitals have negotiated a contract that, with 37% pay increases over 5.5 years, puts the UFT’s unpensionable bonus driven ‘17.58 to 20.42%’ increase to shame. And while the particularities of their situation must of course temper our analysis, there are substantial lessons to be gleaned for UFT members. 

Lesson 1: The Pattern is not Just the Pattern.

Municipal nurses, who technically work for Health + Hospitals, a public-private partnership, still essentially work for the City – the same as teachers, police officers, and the multitude of titles falling under DC37. Like those other titles, municipal nurses generally follow the pattern, and when they’ve broken it, they’ve only done so by a fraction of a percent – much the same as other municipal unions. We, who had our pay expectations shredded to bits by Mulgrew and Cambria’s repeated assertions that the ‘pattern is the pattern,’ may be surprised to see that, this time around, our colleagues in scrubs have so markedly exceeded the subinflation increases to which we are doomed. We’ll get more into the why and how of nurses beating the pattern below, as the leverage they had was much different than that of teachers, but the key for now is that a union can double the pattern when circumstances are ripe to give workers a negotiating advantage. 

Lesson 2: ‘Parity’ is a thing.

Those of us who have been following the situation with OT/PTs, know that they largely voted down their contract because of their own fight to win pay parity with titles such as teachers, speech therapists, and social workers. Mulgrew has suggested that the City is dismissive of the OT/PT parity argument. Yet, the City accepted it from nurses, signaling that parity is indeed a strategy that can work. To be sure, nurses are getting increases to get them closer to parity with NY-based nurses in the private sector. OT/PTs’ claims to parity have been thwarted, reportedly, because private-sector therapists do not make more money than school-based therapists. That’s one reason OT/PTs for a Fair Contract have correctly situated school-based therapists as having a distinctly pedagogical type of work, which should grant them pedagogical pay. The win by nurses suggests that a parity strategy is worth pursuing for OT/PTs in their second round of negotiations – if Mulgrew can get around to doing the work.

Lesson 3: We can benefit from the work of other unions who aren’t encumbered by the Taylor Law.  

Nurses in the private sector have seen large-scale pay increases over the last several years. This has to do with many things, such as (1) the gargantuan profits of the healthcare industry; (2) a massive shortage of nurses, which has driven up salaries as hospitals try to attract workers to apply; and (3) the strike power. Unlike teachers, who have no private sector counterparts to strike without being bound by the ‘Taylor Law,’ nurses in New York have used the strike power much to their advantage. So, while public sector nurses might not be able to strike without the risk of severe penalties, they can apply to seek parity with private sector nurses, who largely used the power of the strike to clear their way into higher tax brackets.

Of course, not all titles have this advantage. OT/PTs, as discussed above, already make about the industry standard. Unless private sector therapists began having massive labor wins, they wouldn’t help the UFT parity argument. Teachers also don’t have private sector counterparts – at least none who would help us with parity. Teachers at private schools and charter schools tend, in fact, to be nonunionized, and to make considerably less on average than teachers in public schools. Attempts to compare us with teachers of suburban districts on long island, who tend to make more than us in the DOE, have also fallen flat. Instead, arbitrators have tended to compare us with teachers in other big cities, which hasn’t done us much good. Perhaps, however, as teachers in cities like LA and Oakland see their salaries skyrocket due to strike  tactics, we’ll be able to use parity arguments’ to make up for our Taylor-bound inadequacy.

Lesson 4: Shortages Matter to the City – at least when it costs them.

We should not assume that the City gave parity to nurses simply because it was ‘the right thing to do.’ (Indeed, an arbitrator actually had to force the City to do so, but I digress, and explore that more in lesson 5). Rather, they were in a substantial and expensive bind, because of the major staffing issues that befall municipal hospitals. Municipal nurses are highly transient, because they can easily transfer to private hospitals where, up-until-now, they were paid much better. Not only has this led to serious staffing issues in municipal hospitals, but it’s been expensive to the City. Indeed, because parity pay increases are expected to help halt nurse turnover, they’re also expected to keep the City from having to assuage staffing issues with expensive ‘temp’ contracts. Indeed, pay parity might actually save the City money. 

With school enrollment falling around the City and many licenses having to even grapple with hiring freezes, teachers are not in the same situation as nurses in this regard. Class size legislation should theoretically change this, though even if that legislation is taken seriously, the lack of an equivalently expensive ‘teacher temp position’ makes it impossible to make a complete analogy with nurses. (Indeed, ‘substitute teachers’ are far less expensive to the City than ‘substitute nurses.’) Nevertheless, as teacher shortages increasingly and unfortunately affect the US, we may see our leverage start to change in negotiations – at least if we have the foresight to include parity language into deals.

Lesson 5: It Pays to Not Take the First Deal.

Nurses had to fight for this deal, invoking a decades-old clause that the employer reportedly did not want to fully honor, which commits the City to paying nurses parity. Indeed, according to their union, “the five-and-a-half-year contract comes after a month of expedited mediation and then impasse arbitration.” This was not a situation like that of the UFT, in which we seemed to take a rushed and imperfect deal to simply ‘get negotiations over with.’ Nurses in general have been far less complacent with the City. While Mulgrew led the charge to force retirees onto inferior Medicare Advantage, for instance, nurses voted ‘no.’ And indeed, it appears that the nurses union, by fighting the City rather than taking the first deal they saw, have gotten their workers a much better deal. There’s a lesson there. But, Mulgrew, who is currently trying to avoid renegotiating the OT/PT contract by orchestrating a re-vote on their original first deal, is unlikely to learn from it.