CWA 1180 - Calendar

City rejects municipal coalition; UFT reaches speedy contract deal

November 2006

After sitting down to meet with the municipal bargaining coalition on October 19, the city's labor commissioner, James Hanley, reversed course and announced that he would no longer recognize the coalition as a bargaining partner. In an October 30 letter to coalition co-chair and United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Randi Weingarten, commissioner James Hanley wrote, "The Office of Labor Relations does not recognize for the purposes of collective bargaining the 'coalition of unions' you and others have recently formed."

Presidents of the 20 coalition member unions, including Local 1180, met to discuss Hanley's rejection and decided that they would continue to coordinate among themselves. They designated the UFT and the Uniformed Sanitationmen— two of the unions who first formed the coalition—to bargain deals for their own units that other coalition members could then use as a pattern in setting their own terms.

After days of late-night bargaining, Weingarten announced on November 7 that the UFT and the City had reached a deal in record time on a new two-year contract featuring a 7.1 percent raise and a higher pay ceiling for teachers with the most experience. The deal also includes a one-time $750 cash payment, a $1,000 longevity increase for teachers after five years on the job, and increased payments into the UFT's welfare fund. Teachers will receive 2 percent on day one of the contract and 5 percent on the eighth month of the contract, for a compounded total of 7.1 percent. (The contract's total value is 7.95 percent when the cash bonus, longevity increase, and welfare fund payments are factored in.) As with the City's October deal with AFSCME District Council 37, the UFT contract includes no givebacks. Talks between the City and the Uniformed Sanitationmen are ongoing.

"We believe that the presence of our bargaining coalition had a huge impact on the agreement reached in October between the City and DC 37 and made that deal far richer than it otherwise would have been," says Local 1180 president Arthur Cheliotes. "The UFT won comparable terms in their new contract, which gives our union a strong starting point going into our own negotiations."

Local 1180's bargaining committee will meet on Friday, November 17, to discuss the ramifications of the UFT deal and move forward in initiating Local 1180 bargaining with the City.

One complication in achieving comparable terms is that Local 1180 has more than a thousand new Coordinating Managers and Administrative Job Opportunity specialists who will be, in effect, negotiating their first contract through the union. Hanley's Office of Labor Relations has insisted that these members are not entitled to existing Local 1180 contract provisions such as the Annuity Fund and the five-year experience differential. The union, for itspart, may seek to set a new salary schedule for these new members. Such knotty issues may slow down the overall bargaining process.

The next coalition meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 14.

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