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…
Page A4From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Essay recalls labor's power to move history; City Hall sues to block teachers' raises the same week.
As it ran on the front
There's a piece running this week about Eugene Debs, about what labor can actually do when it organizes instead of asks nicely. Good piece. Educational. And in the same stack of news, the mayor of New York City is suing his own teachers' union to block a pay raise. Read that twice, because it doesn't get less strange the second time.
Nobody ran on 'I will sue the teachers.' That's not a platform, that's not even a talking point, it's just the kind of thing that happens quietly, in a filing, while everybody's attention is on something louder. A pay raise for the people teaching your kids gets blocked in court by the guy who's supposed to be running the city those kids live in. That's not a policy dispute over the numbers, near as I can tell — it's a lawsuit, which means somebody decided a courtroom was the right place to stop a raise before it happened.…
…(cont) Here's the connection, and it's not subtle: every generation gets an essay reminding it that labor had power once, that it organized and struck and won things nobody handed it. And every generation also gets an official, somebody with the keys, who finds a legal argument for why this particular raise, this particular contract, can wait. The essay is history. The lawsuit is Tuesday. They're printed the same week because that's actually how it works — the reminder and the rollback show up together, always, because the rollback needs you to have forgotten the reminder.
Teachers aren't asking for the moon here. They're asking for a raise that was presumably negotiated, presumably budgeted, presumably owed. If that's worth a lawsuit to stop, the question isn't about the union. The question is who decided a courtroom was cheaper than a paycheck, and whose kids are sitting in the classroom while that argument gets sorted out in front of a judge instead of at a bargaining table. Debs didn't win anything by waiting for somebody to change their mind. That's sort of the whole point of the essay, if anybody in the lawsuit read it.
“You get the essay about labor's power and the lawsuit against labor's raise in the same week, and that's not irony, that's the whole racket. The reminder and the rollback always ship together, because the rollback needs you to have forgotten the reminder.”
“The city has a fiduciary obligation to review labor costs before approving any raise — this is fiscal responsibility, not retaliation, and I don't know why anyone would call it retaliation.”
The receipts
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.