Mayor Zohran Mamdani is suing the New York City Council to block its attempt to make one-time cash payments to school paraprofessionals—staff who support teachers and students but are not licensed teachers themselves. Such payments would normally happen as part of regular union contract negotiations.
The stakes are far bigger than the council legislation’s quarter-billion-dollar price tag: if courts don’t rule for the mayor, public-employee unions will be emboldened to make more demands that they haven’t been able to win at the bargaining table.
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The pay, benefits, and work rules for most New York City employees are set through collective bargaining. Paraprofessionals are represented in that process by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the same union that represents classroom teachers and that dominates the contract process. In the last contract, inked in 2023, both paras and classroom teachers got annual raises between 3 and 3.5 percent. (The last round of raises from this agreement takes effect next month.)
If the UFT were sincerely concerned about the economic plight of the paraprofessionals it represents, it could have steered a bigger share of the funds offered by the city at the bargaining table to boost their pay. Paras themselves had the option to reject the last contract, but 72 percent of dues-paying paraprofessionals (the subset that can vote on the contract) approved that deal.
Last year, however, UFT brass began a campaign lamenting the “unfair money gap” between paraprofessionals and teachers, pressing the city council to authorize a one-time “workforce stabilization payment,” dubbed the “RESPECT check.” The UFT successfully squeezed city council candidates (including most of the council’s Republican members) into pledging support for the checks. Last year, then-candidate Mamdani himself joined that push, citing the number of para position vacancies as evidence that the move was justified.
Last month, the city council unanimously approved the legislation boosting para pay, even with estimates that the measure would cost $244 million in the first year, adding to the $6.4 billion gap the mayor must close in the FY28 budget that he will present early next year.
Seeming to fear a direct confrontation with the UFT, Mamdani didn’t veto the bill. Instead, he allowed it to become law, then sued. The administration argues, correctly, that payments outside the normal negotiation process are preempted by the state’s collective bargaining statute, the 1967 Taylor Law. (It’s easy to imagine the UFT’s response in an opposite scenario, in which the city council voted to reduce paraprofessional pay—say, to prevent layoffs amid a recession. The union would be the first to invoke the Taylor Law and the sanctity of collective bargaining.) Mamdani’s team pegs the cost at $325 million per year.
To be sure, public-sector collective bargaining is deeply problematic: it grants special privileges to inherently political organizations and their leaders and takes decision-making away from elected officials. It causes the public to pay more for lower-quality services.
Public-employee unions already sidestep the bargaining table—lawfully—by pushing the New York State Legislature to do their bidding. The UFT, for example, got lawmakers and Governor Kathy Hochul to sign off on a costly class-size mandate designed to buoy UFT dues revenues amid diminishing enrollment at city Department of Education schools. The Transport Workers Union aims to bolster its ranks by banning one-person train operation (OPTO), and it has all but declared war on Hochul for refusing to go along.
Still, the legislature created the Taylor Law, and regardless of the actual effect on the public interest, it can pass legislation that coexists with it. And it has done so: when lawmakers created control boards for Nassau County, Buffalo, and other municipalities, the unions challenged those boards’ powers to supersede union contracts with moves such as pay freezes, arguing that they violated the U.S. Constitution’s contracts clause. Yet federal judges rebuffed the unions in these cases, citing the legislature’s prerogative.
Put simply, the state legislature, through the Taylor Law, sets the rules of the road, and municipalities—including New York City—must heed those rules.
In a perfect world, local governments would be able to make changes to employee pay, benefits, and work rules, and the mayor would not be handcuffed by collective-bargaining provisions that cause sitcom-worthy examples of inefficiency.
But collective bargaining is the legal environment that the unions have demanded for generations. They pressed Mayor Robert Wagner to bargain formally with them in the 1950s and subsequently to enshrine collective bargaining in the city charter. They got the Taylor Law written to preclude individual workers from negotiating their own terms and conditions of employment.
The fight between the city council and Mamdani will be compelling because of the extent to which the unions have gone in attacking the independence of the state’s judicial system. Three years ago, labor groups tarred Governor Hochul’s eminently qualified pick to be the state’s top judge, Hector LaSalle, as “anti-union” for a decision he’d written in a procedural matter involving illegal activity by union officers.
The UFT seems to be betting that judges, at least at the trial level, will fear getting “LaSalled” if they question the legality of what the union and its proxies are attempting.
Given its potential cost, and lasting implications, the case is likely to be decided ultimately by the Court of Appeals—which, one hopes, will be immune from such pressures and better positioned to rule on the Taylor Law’s legislative intent.
Whatever the eventual outcome, Mayor Mamdani deserves credit for taking on this fight.