City Council Members are pressuring Mayor Zohran Mamdani to drop a city lawsuit blocking $10,000 checks for paraprofessionals – claiming they’ll drop the giveaway if Hizzoner comes to the bargaining table and opens the Big Apple’s checkbook.
The council and Speaker Julie Menin filed a response to Mamdani’s Aug. 19 lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court Thursday, saying the case should be thrown out.
“We did not want to have to pass this bill,” said Menin of Local Law 129 – which would issue emergency “workforce stabilization ” checks to teaching assistants whose current starting salary is $32,000.
The City Council unanimously passed Local Law 129 unanimously in July outside of the regular collective bargaining process with organized labor. The Democrat-led council said it made the move because of 1,700 vacancies for paraprofessionals in the city.
“We always wanted the administration to collectively bargain this or put it in the budget, but that didn’t happen, so we had to act, and that’s why we passed our bill,” Menin explained at a rally on the City Hall steps Thursday.
The Mamdani administration filed a lawsuit against the bill hours after its passing – claiming it violated Taylor’s Law – a New York statute that gives public sector employees the right to organize and collectively bargain with their employers.
“We will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table,” Mamdani said at the time of the lawsuit’s filing.
Critics have said the move would set a bad precedent and water down labor negotiations, giving union members leverage to demand extra concessions after signing a contract.
But Menin, joined by council members and paras, argued the bill doesn’t circumvent the collective bargaining process between the teachers union and the Department of Education – and blamed the administration for not moving forward with the bargaining process to begin with.
“Our bill goes away if the administration collectively bargains this,” Menin argued.
“So if the administration collectively bargains and does the right thing and pays the paraprofessionals what they deserve, our bill goes away, and nothing would make us happier than that.”
Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers –the union that represents nearly 90,000 New York City public school teachers and 25,000 paraprofessionals — echoed Menin’s statements, and claimed the union was trying to do its part to move the bargaining process forward.
“The mayor made a promise. He promised the paraprofessionals that we would fix this, we would get this done. We tried to do it. We are continuing to try to do it…with collective bargaining,” he said.
“But it’s the city and its agencies who created this problem.”
Hizzoner told The Post in a statement that his team was “negotiating in good faith to address the inequity permanently” and that he had a “positive working relationship with Mulgrew” – whom he celebrated the first day of school with on Staten island last week.
“As we work towards a resolution to the litigation and to protect collective bargaining, the City will continue working with UFT and all our labor partners to make meaningful investments in the workers who keep our city running,” said Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for the mayor.
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