The new face of teacher unionism in New York City and beyond
In era of accountability, UFT contract builds on fiscal stability, flexibility, not social mobility
I knew Al Shanker, Mr. Mulgrew, and you’re no Al Shanker.
Would Al Shanker have agreed to let at least 200 schools, thousands of teachers, exit the basic UFT contract?
Would Al Shanker have allowed differentiated teacher salaries beyond the classroom rank (and what highfallutin titles!) from mentor, to ambassador, to master; management titles —management! — in sheep’s clothing?
Al Shanker, organizer Paul Bradford, and the author, c. 1979
Would Shanker have signed off on salary bonuses for select members based on their schools’ staffing needs?
How about a health plan with centralized care rather than choice of private doctors, like other professionals?
And would Shanker ever have shriveled salary demands to less than an average 2% annually, with retroactive pay — salary already earned! — meagerly scattered into the next decade?
Would Al Shanker have let the mayor walk tall out of a contract announcement instead of bringing him to his knees?
Michael Mulgrew
This is the 21st Century with unionism on the run. Shanker helped found the United Federation of Teachers in 1960, becoming its president in 1964. Mulgrew, the UFT’s fifth president, succeeded Randi Weingarten in 2009. He faces a far different city, union, and instructional landscape than Shanker, 50 years ago.
The union, its members, and labor allies were then more militant, focused on substantially raising public employees’ status in a growing economy. Solidly liberal, the city was hospitable to increased wages and improved working conditions among its workers. The political might of the UFT was enough to bring schooling to a halt during its strike over decentralization in 1968 and again, over school cuts, in 1975.
Today, public employees are under siege. Wisconsin ended teachers’ collective bargaining rights. There are increasing numbers of non-unionized charter school teachers, unlike the unionized teachers in Catholic schools back in Shanker’s day. The fiscal crisis of 1975 still looms as a cautionary tale of New York’s near bankruptcy, often blamed on excessive wage and pension packages. Fourteen thousand teachers were laid off with consequent increases in class size for those remaining.
In addition, and most importantly, teachers are now squarely in the middle and upper middle salary The new face of teacher unionism in New York City and beyond | Hechinger Report:
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