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.
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.)…