New York’s socialist mayor has found a labor fight he is willing to spend the city’s lawyers on — and it is against a $10,000 raise for the lowest-paid workers in his own school buildings.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani sued the City Council on Wednesday to block its new bill giving teacher aides a one-time $10,000 payment, a measure he warns could set a dangerous precedent, Just the News reported.
The Council passed the bill last month with a veto-proof majority. It lapsed into law Wednesday without the mayor’s veto — which council members would likely have overridden anyway, according to the City Reporter. Unable to stop it at the desk, Mamdani went to court instead.
The lawsuit argued that the bill overstepped the council’s authority and “set a perilous and unlawful precedent with huge fiscal consequences” for the city’s Education Department, the city at large “and, by extension, the tax-paying public.”
Suddenly the man elected on free buses, city-run groceries and a wealth tax is worried about fiscal consequences. “If the Paraprofessional Pay Bill is allowed to stand, other public employees will undoubtedly seek their own ‘stabilization’ payments from the Council,” the suit argues. “Outside the collective bargaining process, or otherwise use Council proposals for such payments as leverage over that process.”
That is the real objection. Not the money — the precedent that a raise can reach a city worker without going through the machinery the mayor’s allies control.
The mayor has also claimed the city law violates the “Taylor Law,” which covers most public employees in New York and gives them the right to organize and bargain for wage increases and other benefits. In other words, the administration is invoking a labor-rights statute to stop workers from getting paid.
“We will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table,” Mamdani’s spokesman Matt Rauschenbach said in a statement.
The people at the center of it are not abstractions. The $10,000 payments would go to paraprofessionals — teacher aides who work with students with disabilities and special needs, the staff who spend the day with the children the system finds hardest to serve.
Paraprofessionals in the city are paid $33,000 a year to start and can make more than $56,000 in 15 years, according to the United Federation of Teachers. Fifteen years of that work, in the most expensive city in America, and the ceiling is still under sixty thousand dollars.
The City Council — hardly a nest of conservatives — looked at those numbers and voted a one-time payment through with a margin big enough to roll the mayor. The mayor’s answer was a lawsuit.
Left-on-left fights are usually about who gets credit. This one is about who gets $10,000, and the socialist is the one arguing they should not have it.
Source: justthenews.com
