Trachtenberg Award

The UFT celebrates the accomplishments of its chapters, the heart and soul of the UFT, by bestowing Trachtenberg awards at Teacher Union Day.

About the honorees for the 2019-20 school year

Each November, the UFT hosts Teacher Union Day to commemorate the anniversary of the union’s strike in 1960 to gain collective bargaining rights and to honor the union activists of today. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UFT had to postponed its regular celebration but held a special virtual ceremony on Jan. 14 to recognize 28 chapter leaders who exemplify how the union can empower and organize members to use their professional voices to advocate for our students, for the safety of our school communities, and for public education.

Congratulations to the winners:

Elementary Schools 

Junior High/Middle Schools

High Schools

District 75

Functional Chapters 

About the Trachtenberg award

Ely Trachtenberg emerged as a teacher leader in a time in New York City when workers regularly engaged in fierce political debates centered around trade unionism.  Founding members and others around in the early years, said Trachtenberg’s theoretical acumen, coupled with first-rate organizing skills, made him a force for our union. What he recognized from the start was the importance of creating and nurturing unionism at its most basic level: the school chapter.

He had been an auto worker and noted how relationships that developed on the shop floor became the seedbed of cooperation and solidarity. Later, as a teacher unionist, Trachtenberg stressed the active participation of the rank-and-file through frequent chapter meetings, newsletters and social activities — any activity that brought people together. Sadly, because of his untimely death at age 40, he never lived to see the fruit of his efforts bloom into the network of communications that chapters and the UFT have today. The chapters being honored today carry on the tradition he began and the future he envisioned.