When Mayor Zohran Mamdani sued the City Council over its end-run move to give $10,000 bonuses to teachers’ aides outside the normal collective bargaining process, the mayor placed himself at the short end of a two-on-one battle.
Not only would the mayor square off against the City Council, a frequent sparring partner, but he would also embark on his first major fight with a public sector union, in this case the United Federation of Teachers.
In doing so, a mayor eager to burnish his pro-worker bona fides has scrambled conventional wisdom and left himself in the strange position of being praised by some of his most committed critics.
“Mamdani does right,” read a recent headline from The New York Post’s conservative editorial board, the piece praising Mr. Mamdani, the man they love to hate, for blocking bonuses for poorly paid teachers’ aides. “Kudos to Mamdani for eating his campaign promise to support the bonus bill; it’s a sign of good sense that he looked more carefully and thought better,” the board wrote.
There is broad agreement that teachers’ aides — who can make as little as $32,000 a year and typically work with public school children with disabilities — deserve a raise. The dispute is over whether the union can secure its members more money outside a bargaining process that is enshrined in state and local law. The Mamdani administration has argued that doing so would set “a dangerous precedent.”
The city’s teachers’ union worked with the Council to draft legislation that would give those employees one-time bonuses of $10,000, which the union described as a stopgap measure to provide urgently needed help to paraprofessionals in advance of contract negotiations.
The city has a shortage of paraprofessionals and is poised to pay $1.5 billion next year to send children with disabilities to private schools. The Council bill, which passed unanimously and became law, was also designed to attract new paraprofessionals and save money in the long run, the legislation’s proponents argued.
Julie Menin, the Democratic Council speaker who has positioned herself as a counterbalance to the mayor, has argued that the raises are both a fiscal and moral necessity.
“It is unacceptable that paraprofessionals who support some of our highest-need students are earning as little as $32,000 a year,” Ms. Menin said in a statement released with another Council member after the lawsuit was filed.
The teachers’ union, which did not endorse Mr. Mamdani in last year’s Democratic primary for mayor but backed him in the general election, has promised to fight the city move to block the law. Last week, the United Federation of Teachers filed a motion to join the Council’s legal fight against City Hall.
Michael Mulgrew, the union’s president, said the Council “acted responsibly” and carefully crafted the bill to avoid any violations of labor law. He criticized City Hall over its court action.
“The lowest-paid workers in my union, majority Black and brown women, you’re trying to stop them from getting this check, good luck with that,” he said.
Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesman for the mayor, said that the city is eager to give paraprofessionals raises, and has been working with the teachers’ union “to permanently address this inequity.”
“We filed suit to ensure that negotiations between the city and its work force remain at the bargaining table rather than being decided through political intervention,” he added.
Some of Mr. Mamdani’s critics seemed encouraged, viewing his move on paraprofessionals as a sign that he may govern less as an ideologue and more as a hardheaded pragmatist.
Ken Girardin, a fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute who often denounces what he sees as the left’s profligate spending, wrote of the dispute, “Mayor Mamdani deserves credit for taking on this fight.”
Mr. Girardin noted that the paraprofessional pay bill would cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars a year; the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group, estimated the cost to be roughly $325 million.
But the United Federation of Teachers’ approach has rankled good-government groups and labor relations experts, who say that granting the bonuses outside of collective bargaining is illegal, and could invite other unions to create their own side deals.
“In a well-established collective bargaining system like we have here in New York City and New York State, to have the City Council legislating about pay, that bothers me, to be honest,” said Harry Charles Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University. “It undermines the system. It’s a well-established and well-functioning system.”
Paraprofessionals should certainly be paid more, said Robert Gordon, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School who co-wrote an op-ed earlier this year that encouraged Mr. Mamdani to push back on labor unions when necessary.
“But it can’t be a one-off where you get a happy press release,” Mr. Gordon said, “and the bill is paid later on by somebody else.”
Mr. Mamdani’s leftist, pro-labor credentials will be tested over the next year, when he must negotiate a slew of expiring municipal contracts, a difficult task with a projected $6.4 billion deficit for the 2028 fiscal year.
Mr. Gordon, who served in the Biden administration and worked for former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said he was hopeful that the mayor’s approach to the pay issue would set the tone for City Hall’s future dealings with unions.
The Post’s editorial said much the same: “Mamdani’s courage here might even signal a willingness to stand firm in the coming round of contract talks with every city union.”
New York is facing substantial budget deficits, and it remains unclear how Mr. Mamdani will fund generous union contracts, not to mention his most ambitious initiatives like city-funded child care for all.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has also continued to look askance at Mr. Mamdani’s calls to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers.
Those headwinds have, at times, left the city’s democratic socialist mayor preaching fiscal moderation.
The mayor and Council spent weeks embroiled in a conflict this year over how much the city could afford to spend on a rental assistance program, the cost of which was ballooning.
As a mayoral candidate, Mr. Mamdani had vowed to expand the program, but reversed course once he was in City Hall, much to the frustration of advocates for the homeless and to the relief of budget experts.
Mr. Mamdani ultimately argued that the city could not afford to expand the program, known as CityFHEPS, as Ms. Menin and the Council wanted.
Ms. Menin eventually assented to a deal to create a separate voucher program, one that is not an entitlement, but that has a capped budget, and to cease ongoing litigation when she and the mayor struck a budget agreement in June.
Mr. Mamdani’s positions on pay for city workers and housing vouchers, said Andrew Rein, who runs the Citizens Budget Commission, reveal something about how the city’s new mayor operates that may surprise some Mamdani skeptics.
“There were concerns, among some people, of a young inexperienced mayor coming in — would he be pragmatic enough to actually run the city?” said Mr. Rein, who has criticized Mr. Mamdani in the past. “I think those concerns haven’t been borne out.”
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