Increasing Para Pay: Making A Slogan into A Reality

Neither ABC or ARISE have offered any ideas on how to improve para pay, just platitudes...but can’t bring themselves to endorse the only plan that exists – because it has been put forward by Unity

Leo Casey is UFT Retired VP Academic High Schools

The test of union leadership is not whether it can recognize a problem when it presents itself: that is only the first and simplest part of leadership. Rather, the true test is whether it can understand why the problem developed, and fashion a workable solution that will rectify it.

This is the test that must be applied to the issue of paraprofessional pay in the current UFT elections. Which of the three slates competing in the election – UNITY, ABC, ARISE – has a clear understanding of how and why the problem of low para pay developed? Which of the three caucuses has a feasible plan for addressing the problem?

The History of Para Pay

Under the leadership of the Unity Caucus, the paraprofessionals first organized with the UFT in 1969. A year later, the chapter won their first contract, which doubled para salaries. The first para contracts also secured important benefits such as the career ladder for paraprofessionals. Just as unionization brought significant salary, pension, and benefit improvements for New York City public school teachers, it produced major gains for paras.

But in 1975, these early successes for paras, like the advances for teachers, were brought to a grinding halt by New York City’s fiscal crisis. In an unsuccessful effort to stop a massive loss of funding to city schools, the UFT went on strike for five days. But a strike was not an effective weapon when the city was on the verge of bankruptcy and the federal and state governments were not forthcoming with aid: the cuts went through, and some 14,000 UFTers – teachers, paras, and other titles – were laid off. With greatly diminished funding and many fewer UFTers in the classrooms, curriculum was cut to the bone, arts education and physical education slashed, and class sizes exploded. Many young teachers and paras who were laid off never returned to the classroom: a significant portion of a generation of NYC educators was lost. Those UFTers who had enough seniority to escape layoffs often found themselves excessed into different schools. It would be decades before the NYC public schools recovered from the negative impact of the fiscal crisis.

By the early 1970s, the fruits of unionization had made NYC teachers and paras among the best paid in the nation; but after 1975, we began to lose ground, especially to the surrounding suburbs. For a number of years, the city’s revenues were in dire straits, and New York State law no longer allowed the city to run a budgetary deficit. But equally important, collective bargaining with the city changed in the wake of the 1975 fiscal crisis. The city contended that one of the reasons for the crisis was that it had been whipsawed by different municipal unions, with each contract taken as a ‘floor’ for negotiations with the next union, and that it needed to constrain the city’s collective bargaining costs. Using this argument, the city declared that it would adopt a policy of “pattern bargaining”: in each round of bargaining, the contractual raise for the first union to reach an agreement would set a ‘ceiling’ for each subsequent union. This policy, the city contended, would allow it to know and plan for the total cost of collective bargaining with municipal unions. The city would also “cost” new, non-monetary benefits for employees in a contract, and count them against the salary increase. (For many years, this policy kept the UFT from making any progress on class size, since the city insisted that smaller classes were a benefit for teachers and that their cost should therefore come out of the salary increases for UFT members.)

“Pattern bargaining” had a particularly negative impact on para pay. When raises are calculated on a percentage basis, as the “pattern bargaining” framework does, it advantages those with the higher base pay, who end up receiving more dollars, and disadvantages those with the lower base pay, who end up receiving fewer dollars. Over time, this advantage is compounded: the gap between para pay and teacher pay, let alone principal pay, has grown since 1975. The UFT has the ability to make minor adjustments in the compensation package of different constituencies, and on occasions in the past, it has found ways to give paras a bit more. But the problem we face today is that paras needs have become so substantial that meeting them under “pattern bargaining” would significantly diminish what other UFTers would get in a salary increase, and thus pose a real threat to union solidarity.

What Can Be Done?

For municipal unions, the way in which the city has implemented “pattern bargaining” was at least as objectionable as the idea itself. In each round of negotiations, the city has picked a municipal union which had a weaker case and the less political power to reach the first agreement and set the pattern; over the decades in which the policy has been in place, the UFT has never been first. There have been attempts to coordinate among the municipal unions, with the goal of having a stronger union set the pattern, but they have never borne fruit. The city would just drag out negotiations with the stronger unions, refusing to finalize an agreement, and as pressure from their members for raises grew, the weaker union would eventually agree to a pattern-setting contract.

Given the problems with “pattern bargaining,” municipal unions have asked for more than the pattern in fact finding and arbitration. In the past, the UFT had a particularly strong case in this regard, because as pay for NYC educators fell behind that in the suburbs after 1975, city schools found it harder and harder to attract and retain qualified teachers. But given the origins of “pattern bargaining” in the 1975 fiscal crisis, arbitrators have consistently rejected municipal union challenges to it, including from the UFT, and deferred to what they said was the city’s need for stability in the costs of its workforce. Today, no arbitrator is about to render a decision that reverses close to fifty years of precedents that has made “pattern bargaining” into a cornerstone of labor relations for NYC public employees.

To implement a strategy that can provide a significant salary increase to paras, you first have to understand the nature of the problem – what “pattern bargaining” is, how it came into being, and how it created the problem with para pay. The opposition slates in the upcoming UFT election fail to meet this test, and not by a small margin either. ABC’s presidential candidate thinks that “pattern bargaining” is not a policy developed by New York City to limit what municipal unions can win for their members in contract negotiations, but an expression of labor solidarity: “Making ‘pattern bargaining’ the enemy is unbelievable to me, because its history is rooted in the idea that unions will not compete with one another, that we are one labor movement, and that we are stronger when we are together.” ARISE’s presidential candidate believes that “pattern bargaining” is a “gentleman’s agreement” among unions to not ask for more than what the first union is able to get in negotiations. If you want to break the pattern, all you have to do is go into negotiations demanding more, and let the city know you aren’t going to accept its “crappy raises.” These declarations don’t get a detail wrong here or there; they completely misunderstand “pattern bargaining,” its history, and its current reality.

The problem is that the UFT Presidency is not a position where you can do on-the-job training: Wall Street, City Hall, and Albany are not going to give you a grace period while you take a crash course on the 1975 fiscal crisis and how it has impacted labor relations in New York City. The time to pick the brains of the people on the union side who have negotiated union contracts under “pattern bargaining,” the time to read the analysis of pro-labor scholars such as Kim Phillips-Fein (Fear City), Josh Freeman (Working-Class New York), and Jon Shelton (Teacher Strike!) on the subject, is before you run for a position which would make you responsible for the lives and well-being of public school educators and the students they teach and nurture.

If the ABC and ARISE slates had done their homework and were prepared to lead the UFT, they would have explained that the pattern can be “broken” in one of two ways. The first way is for a union to openly declare that it intends to break it, and when the city refuses – as it will – to embark on a long, intense, and difficult strike. Since what is at stake is not just whether a raise is 3% or 5%, but the way in which the city has conducted labor relations and constrained labor costs for the last half-century, it will go to the mat. There is no guarantee, to say the very least, that such a strike would be successful; it would be illegal under a law that authorizes very heavy penalties against individuals on strike and the union. If it is a slate’s intention to lead the union into a strike of this magnitude, then it owes it to the members to be honest and upfront about those intentions.

The second way is to find ways around the pattern that do not expressly challenge it. By using its political influence to pass state legislation that lowered class size, the UFT was able to circumvent the city’s insistence at the negotiation table that the cost of this improvement would have to come out of UFTers salaries. In the 2000s, the UFT was able to overcome the salary gap that had opened up with suburban educators after the 1975 fiscal crisis, with increases over 40% that were far above the pattern, by lengthening our school day to what suburban school districts used; this allowed the city to claim it was within the pattern. The political campaign that the UFT has undertaken to pass legislation out of City Council that would increase para salaries by $10,000 a year, in annually recurring payments, is a way around the pattern that gets paras the boost in income they deserve and need. It’s a solid, feasible idea that goes beyond recognizing the para pay is a serious problem to finding a practical solution.

What is remarkable here is that neither ABC nor ARISE have offered an idea of their own on how to improve para pay, just platitudes about how it is important, but they can’t bring themselves to offer an unqualified endorsement of the only plan that exists – because it has been put forward by the UFT leadership and the Unity caucus. A true leader would embrace a good idea, regardless of whom put it forward.