NYC Educator: Thompson Says No Raises for Teachers, to Near-Universal Acclaim of UFT Delegate Assembly

NYC Educator: Thompson Says No Raises for Teachers, to Near-Universal Acclaim of UFT Delegate Assembly:

Thompson Says No Raises for Teachers, to Near-Universal Acclaim of UFT Delegate Assembly

by NYC Educator

What happens when you publicly announce teachers don't deserve the raise all other city employees got between 2008-2010? Well, you get the UFT endorsement, of course. Now it's a little more complicated than that, of course. During the last mayoral run, it appeared that Thompson and the UFT were BFFs. In fact, sometimes I heard Thompson say things that could just as well have come out of the mouth of any UFT official.

But then, of course, came the moment the UFT declined to endorse him. This upset me, and I remember telling a UFT rep about it at my first chapter leader training. The rep confided to me that this was a practical decision, and that the UFT could only sway the public by 5%. All the polls said Thompson was way behind, so that did make some degree of sense.

At a later CL training, after Thompson had lost by precisely 5%, a more senior UFT official announced that we could only move the election by 3%, and that had Hitler been running we may have taken a principled stand. I was kind of surprised we would need Hitler before we asserted principle, but I'm just a lowly teacher, so what