The City Council blasted Mayor Zohran Mamdani as Hizzoner fights lawmakers bypassed the collective bargaining process to give teaching assistants $10,000 pay bumps outside of their contracts.
The council’s attorneys asked a Manhattan judge in Tuesday court papers to drop Mamdani’s lawsuit — saying if the mayor doesn’t like the giveaway, he should bake it into his own labor negotiations.
“The Mayor, who affirmatively chose to bring this lawsuit, does not get to litigate his case in an imaginary world bereft of legislative history that he dislikes,” the legal team said in a legal brief.
“Together, these indisputable facts demonstrate that this legal dispute and the underlying staffing crisis are the result of Plaintiff’s own conduct and could be resolved by Plaintiffs themselves without this Court’s intervention.”
Lawmakers said the extra dough was necessary to offset the paraprofessional staffing crisis with the economic relief payments.
Mamdani has said the council’s move in July to give out the extra cash illegally bypasses collective bargaining laws as it deals with the influential United Federation of Teachers Union, but the council shot back that the move was simply the result of City Hall’s “own conduct.”
Mamdani’s team argued in October papers that the payments — which would put the city out an estimated $325 million — constitute a pay increase outside of the union’s contract.
“Although the Council labels these ‘stabilization’ payments, they function as stipends or salary bonuses and, regardless of terminology, would provide eligible school paraprofessionals with an additional form of compensation for the current school year,” the administration’s attorney Steve Banks wrote in the filing.
“No amount of legal artistry can avoid the fact that these payments increase the compensation of eligible school paraprofessionals.”
The collective bargaining law — which is coined ‘Taylor’s Law’ — plainly states that union worker wages and salaries are to be discussed at the bargaining table.
But the City Council contends that the one-time payments are aboveboard and do not breach the law — which a spokesperson for the legislative body noted says “nothing about precluding other worker avenues for benefits.”
The UFT – which represents the roughly 25,000 public school assistant teachers eligible for the relief checks – has also lambasted the Mayor over the lawsuit, and joined the council as a co-defendant on the case last month.
The union argues that the mayor and Department of Education declined to renegotiate the teachers’ pay mid-contract, leaving them with no choice due to the increasing number of aides leaving the job.
“This law has one mission: attracting and keeping enough paraprofessionals in our schools to serve our kids. That mission is what the Mayor is suing to stop. We are asking the court to dismiss the mayor’s lawsuit,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers in an October news release.
Paraprofessionals make as little as $32,000 a year for full-time work – and the profession has nearly 2,000 vacancies in Big Apple public schools.
The union’s current contract which started in 2022 isn’t up until November 2027.
