NYC Educator: Tough Days for Teachers

NYC Educator: Tough Days for Teachers:

Tough Days for Teachers

by NYC Educator

Open up any paper and look at the madness that's infected our nation. In Chicago, the government has reneged on an agreement to give teachers a 4% pay increase. Instead, they want to raise their number of hours worked, give them 2% the first year of a five-year contract, and have them hope for the best for the next four years. Now, the CTU has overwhelmingly authorized a strike.

That doesn't mean there will be a strike, of course. If Chicago wants to work out something reasonable, it can be averted. Here in NYC, we've been without a raise for four years. All non-educators got raises in excess of 8% for the 2008-2010 round of pattern bargaining, without givebacks. So now, we are headed to fact-finding at PERB, which brought us, among other things, the 2005 contract.

What creative solutions will PERB recommend? Since other unions got a raise giving up nothing, is that suitable for us? It should be, actually, since we had to offer massive givebacks to supersede the pattern in the past. Also, PERB has declared the pattern pretty much sacrosanct. The question is, does that apply when the pattern is