Standing union strong

“It’s going to take all hands on deck to get us from here to the finish line,” Carl Cambria, the union’s chief negotiator, told members on Sept. 17 during the first in-person meeting of the UFT Contract Negotiating Committee. Some 750 members from all divisions and titles — the union’s largest bargaining committee ever — gathered inside Shanker Hall at UFT headquarters for what is expected to be more than a year of crafting demands and negotiating to secure a new contract with the city Department of Education.

The current DOE-UFT contract expires on Nov. 28, 2027. Members volunteered to join the current negotiating committee at the end of last school year. The first meeting was held online on June 23; the Sept. 17 in-person meeting briefed committee members on the specifics of the negotiations timeline, the process of setting contract goals and the importance of building solidarity and engagement among members.

“We’re going to be standing shoulder to shoulder with our fellow members, being smart about how to get this done,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the members gathered.

The sheer size of this year’s committee requires a longer lead time than in past contract cycles, Mulgrew said. Committee members will be trained in how to craft demands as well as in “table tactics,” or strategies for persuasion and negotiation.

In early November, the union will survey UFT members to give them an opportunity to voice their goals, concerns and priorities for the next contract. The results of the survey will inform union contract demands. Committee members, many of them chapter leaders, delegates and paraprofessional representatives, will encourage their members to fill out the survey so that the committee has an accurate understanding of the issues that are most important to UFT members.

Racquel Blair McPherson, the former chapter leader of Channel View School for Research in the Rockaways in Queens, encouraged members to fill out the survey when it hits their email inboxes. “If you don’t fill out the survey,” she said, “how will we know what to look at? I can speak to five people, or even 30 people — but if we get the survey out, and it’s filled out by 85% of our members, then we get a better understanding of what we’re going to the table with.”

The committee will work for months, crafting demands based on the survey and the working conditions in schools and worksites, before starting the actual negotiations.

The union wants to build on the successes of the last round of bargaining for the current 2023 contract. “We’ve had four consecutive contracts with no givebacks,” Cambria noted. Other wins gained in the current contract include “four in a row” protection for elementary school educators, virtual parent-teacher conferences and an annual retention bonus.

Committee members represent all divisions, boroughs and bargaining units. That’s key, said Chapter Leader Nicole Zernone of West End Secondary School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, adding that it was also important that rank-and-file UFT members take the lead in the negotiating process. “We’re the ones doing the work,” said Zernone, an art teacher. “Every day, we’re in the schools, we’re with the kids, we know best.”