Latest News and Comment from Education

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

NYC Educator: Scraping the Skies

NYC Educator: Scraping the Skies:

Scraping the Skies

That was how a piece in the UFT blog Edwize characterized the 2005 contract. The guy who wrote the piece used a false name, then retired at the end of the year to score a cool patronage gig, The rest of us got extra time, hall patrols, lunchroom duty, the ATR brigade, and lost the right to grieve file letters simply because they were factually untrue.

At the time, people like me warned against the contract. We said that while money comes and goes, hall patrol is forever. For example, we knew that there were contracts with no raises. One of them was very recent, having been predicated by a fraudulent vote that sent DC37 leaders to jail. No one objects to things like that, and if every employee of NYC is screwed, that's just the way things go.

At this point, things are even worse than I could have predicted. In fact, not only did we not get a raise during the last round of pattern bargaining, but virtually everyone else in the city did. This means that whatever monetary