The United Federation of Teachers filed a motion to intervene after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sued to block paraprofessional bonuses he once backed.
Page B2From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Mamdani sues to block teachers' pay raises as a magazine extols the power of labor.
As it ran on the front
The pay raise promised to New York City's public school teachers died this week in litigation, before it reached anyone's paycheck. It was young; contract negotiations had barely finished, the ink on the union agreement not yet dry, when a lawsuit arrived to block it. It is survived by the teachers who were counting on it, and by the students in their classrooms, who inherit the difference.
It was preceded in death by the pay raises before it, all of which did eventually arrive, which is what made this one easy to plan a budget around and harder to explain losing.…
…(cont) The suit was filed by the mayor's office, the same office that spent a campaign speaking the language of labor, which made the filing notable enough to draw notice from a magazine that same week publishing an essay on the power organized labor holds, a coincidence of timing this desk does not editorialize about but does record.
No official cause of death has been given beyond the legal filing itself. The union has not been asked to comment on whether the language of solidarity survives contact with a budget office; this desk suspects it does, in speeches, and considerably less well in arbitration.
The raise is survived by its own paperwork, still on file, still describing numbers that will not be paid out on the current schedule. It is not survived by the assumption, common among educators until recently, that an ally in City Hall stays an ally once the bill comes due. That assumption did not make it either, and this desk is not aware of any lawsuit required to kill it; it seems to have gone on its own, quietly, the way most assumptions about municipal government do.
Malarkey has been offered in its place, in the standard municipal varieties: budget constraints, timing, process. The teachers have heard these before, from other administrations, in other years, and found them equally persuasive then.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you attend the next public contract session and bring a notebook, because someone should be keeping count of what was promised against what arrives.
“He talks like a union man and sues like a landlord. Teachers were told to wait on their raise the same week a magazine ran an essay on how much power labor holds — somebody forgot to send the mayor's office a copy.”
“The lawsuit is about the integrity of the negotiation process, not the raise itself, nobody's against teachers getting paid — well, the suit is specifically about stopping this raise, so I suppose somebody is, but procedurally, not personally.”
The receipts
The following essay is excerpted from the book This is How We Win: A Guide to Building Working-Class Uprisings , forthcoming on September 8 from Haymarket Books. We highly recommend checking it out. By the beginning of the 20th century…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.