Mamdani sues to block $10,000 bonuses for NYC school aides

Mayor argues council bonus law circumvents bargaining requirement

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani filed a lawsuit last week to block a City Council law that would pay roughly 25,000 school aides one-time bonuses of $10,000, pitting Mamdani against a labor union that endorsed him in last year’s race.

The City Council voted unanimously in late July to grant the bonuses to the aides, who are known as paraprofessionals and who work with students with special needs, starting at about $32,000 a year. Mamdani did not veto the bill, allowing it to automatically become law, then sued the council in state court days later. His administration put the cost at an estimated $325 million.

The lawsuit reverses a campaign-era position Mamdani had previously endorsed; he said during his campaign that he supported the bonuses. It also puts him at odds with the United Federation of Teachers, the influential labor group that represents the aides and teachers in the nation’s largest school system. Michael Mulgrew, the president of the 200,000-member teachers union, threatened an “all-out war” in a New York Times interview earlier this summer if Mamdani tried to stop the legislation; the union filed a motion to intervene in the case this week.

The legal argument centers on a decades-old New York City law that requires collective bargaining between unions and the mayor — not legislation — to determine compensation. Allowing the council-approved bonuses to stand, the lawsuit argues, would give unions a path to seek pay increases that circumvent the give-and-take of the traditional bargaining process.

A spokesman for the mayor said the Mamdani administration filed the lawsuit “to ensure that negotiations between the city and its workforce remain at the bargaining table rather than being decided through political intervention.” He added that the mayor’s office has been in talks with the teachers union to address the need for fair compensation for school aides.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin, a Democrat, said the council had hoped Mamdani would have negotiated pay raises for paraprofessionals or included salary bumps in the budget passed earlier this year. When that didn’t happen, the council went forward with the legislation, she said, adding that the school aides are underpaid. Raising their salaries, she said, would help fill the 1,600 vacancies the city currently has for the role and lower education costs in the long run.

“We believe that it is not only the right thing normatively to raise a paraprofessional’s salary, but it is the right thing fiscally,” Menin said.

Mulgrew said in a statement that the council’s legislation addresses chronic workforce shortages. “The council took this action because it was necessary, and they did it in a way that legally protects collective bargaining,” Mulgrew said.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-reform think tank, said it was surprising to see a rift between the teachers union and a Democratic politician. “It’s always surprising when you see a big rift between the teachers unions and Democratic politicians, especially a pretty far-left Democratic politician,” Petrilli said. “Conventional wisdom would say that Democratic politicians try not to get sideways with important parts of their constituency and the teachers unions are such an important base.”

Evan Stone, chief executive of the teacher advocacy group Educators for Excellence, said the council’s legislation left the mayor in a “really tricky place.” Stone said Mamdani agrees the school aides deserve pay hikes but needs to hold the line on the traditional process for setting compensation. Historically, mayors have used pattern bargaining to set a standard percentage raise across city union contracts and avoid one group getting a much larger pay hike than another, he said.

“I think it would throw the historical process into question at a time when there are very tight budget constraints,” Stone said of the bonuses. He added that the legal fight could hurt Mamdani’s relationship with many of the teachers who supported his mayoral bid.

“There’s a sense of frustration that some teachers are going to feel of, ‘Why hasn’t he delivered on this promise he supported during the campaign?’,” Stone said.

The aides-bonus dispute is the latest of several campaign pledges Mamdani has revisited since taking office. Earlier this year, contending with a looming budget deficit, Mamdani secured the delay of a state law mandating smaller class sizes and the hiring of additional teachers, despite his support for the requirement during his campaign. Citing ballooning costs, he has also pushed back on a City Council law expanding a rental voucher program that he supported as a candidate.

Democratic strategist Evan Stavisky said the cost constraints also apply to decisions on the city’s workforce. “The mayor is as passionate about helping low-wage workers as any of his predecessors, if not more so,” Stavisky said. “But he still took an oath and he still has to wake up every day and be the boss of a quarter million or so unionized workers.”