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 A8From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
Labor history lesson runs same week Mamdani sues to block teacher pay raises
As it ran on the front
There's a piece running this week reminding everybody what Eugene Debs understood about the power labor holds — the simple fact that the people who do the work can stop doing the work, and everything stops with them. It's a good history lesson. Debs went to prison for saying it out loud. The idea didn't go with him.
Same week, a few pages over, the current mayor of New York City is suing his own city's teachers union to block a pay raise for educators. Not proposing a smaller number. Not countering with a different figure. Suing to stop a raise from taking effect. That's the receipt, and it sits right next to the essay about labor's power like somebody left it there on purpose.…
…(cont) Here's the walk. Debs's whole point — the point that got him a federal sentence — was that labor only has leverage when it's allowed to use it. Take away the raise, and you've taken away the proof that showing up to the table works. Do that enough times, from enough desks, in enough cities, and the lesson people take from it isn't Debs's lesson. It's the opposite one: that the table doesn't hold, no matter who's sitting at it, no matter what letter's next to their name.
This isn't a story about one lawsuit. It's a story about what happens to the idea of labor power when the people who write about it and the people who block it turn out to share the same news cycle. You can run the essay and the lawsuit on the same page and call it balance, or you can notice that only one of those two items has an actual docket number attached to it, and only one of them is happening to an actual paycheck.
Teachers were due a raise. A lawsuit is now standing between them and it. Whatever the legal argument turns out to be, the sequence is the sequence: raise announced, raise sued over. Debs would've had a word for that. It's not a compliment, and it's not a coincidence that it landed the same week as the essay explaining exactly why it matters.
“Eugene Debs is getting a whole essay this week about the power labor holds, and two clicks over, the mayor's office is in court trying to keep New York City teachers from getting a pay raise. The essay's not wrong about what labor can do — it's just describing a muscle that somebody in city hall is currently trying to cut.”
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.