Testimony of UFT President Michael Mulgrew before the New York City Council Committees on Education and Civil Service & Labor

Good afternoon. My name is Michael Mulgrew, and I am the president of the United Federation of Teachers. On behalf of our members, I want to thank Education Committee Chair Mark Treyger, Labor Committee Chair Daneek Miller and the entire Council for the opportunity to testify before you today.

New York City educators and all city employees need paid parental leave.

As a former New York City public school teacher, I know of too many cases where a female instructor went back to work before her child was out of the hospital or went into labor at her school because of the Department of Education’s archaic maternity-leave policy.

As a labor leader, I have met too many fathers and adoptive and foster parents who cannot spend time with their newborns or the children they bring into their homes because the Department of Education’s policy doesn’t recognize them or their families.

Here are just a few of their stories:

“My son was a ‘micro-preemie’ born at just 25-week gestation, 2 pounds, 13 inches and critically ill,” said Jillian Rivera a kindergarten special education teacher in the Bronx. “He couldn’t breathe on his own and had to be intubated for two weeks. When I returned to the classroom, he was still in the neonatal intensive care unit and still critical. I hadn’t even held him skin to skin by the time I was back in the classroom. But, 112 days later, when he was finally home, the Department of Education’s maternity leave policy didn’t allow me to take time to care for him once he was out of the hospital. I had to go off payroll to care for him, and we lived off savings and a tax return.”

“As a new dad, I was not eligible for parental leave after the birth of my daughter,” said Thomas Stoppini, a high school social studies teacher in Brooklyn. “I had to return to the classroom instead of being able to care for my wife, our newborn daughter and our severely disabled 8-year-old son. Franca, my wife, gave birth to our daughter, Julianna, by Caesarian section and was under strict orders not to lift anything heavy, including our older son, T.J., who can’t walk or talk and basically needs 24-hour care. Our morning routine means brushing my 8-year-old’s teeth, changing his diaper, giving him breakfast and his medicine, changing his clothes and lifting him into his wheelchair. My wife couldn’t do any of that after Julianna was born. And with a growing family, I couldn’t afford to go off payroll to stay home to help. We were lucky that my mother and mother-in-law could help, but others aren’t that lucky. The policy needs to change.”

“I thought if we help other children for a living and change their lives, and we help other parents raise their own children, that we would have a chance to raise our own,” said Anna Dawidowska, a Queens high school teacher, who had to borrow sick days in order to have time with her son, Filip, who was born premature. “Filip is now a year old, and so my family and friends are starting to ask when we will have a second child. The answer is not now: not until I have saved enough sick days to cover being out, a process that can take years. At this point, in my family, we can’t afford to have another child if this maternity rule does not change.”

I have heard many such stories from my members.

So when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in December, 2015, that he wanted to provide paid parental leave for municipal employees, I quickly said the UFT wanted to negotiate this benefit for its members.

I thought we finally had a willing partner, someone who wanted to make sure the city’s teaching force and all city employees had this benefit. Yet more than two years later, no municipal unionized workers have it.

The UFT’s membership is overwhelmingly female — close to 77 percent. I have a feeling if the ratios were reversed, and the DOE’s teaching force was 77 percent male and needed a vital benefit, that somehow the city would have found a way to get it done.

Instead, we’ve been stonewalled.

The DOE’s current policy allows new mothers to take six to eight weeks of leave, but they must effectively pay for any days they take using accrued sick days. Fathers and adoptive and foster parents do not even have this option.

Many of my members need to be home with their child for more than the allotted time, so they make the financially difficult decision to go off payroll.

I can’t help but think the DOE enjoys the status quo, which means saving money any time any of my members go off payroll.

What is so frustrating is that during these stalled talks, the city continues to trumpet the importance of paid parental leave.

Soon after the city's initial press release, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that 20,000 nonunion managers and other city employees would receive paid parental leave under terms he imposed. On paper, the policy matched de Blasio’s promise to provide municipal union employees with six weeks of paid time off for maternity, paternity, adoption and foster care leave at 100 percent of salary and up to 12 weeks using existing benefits.

In September 2017, however, the city’s Independent Budget Office issued a report showing that the cost to city managers — forfeiting a 0.47 percent raise and a loss of vacation time — added up to $8.2 million, while the expense to the city was only $2.4 million in the program’s first year. The IBO report makes it sound like the mayor and his administration were trying to make money off of families having children.

The UFT has always been a responsible partner in its negotiations. But I will not let the city make money off of our members having children.

Educators have fought for decades for a common-sense parental leave policy.

But time and again, it has been the federal government, not New York City, that has made child care leave a priority — first in the 1970s with legislation allowing paid sick time to be used for a maternity leave, and again in the 1990s with the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows parents to take unpaid leave for up to 12 weeks.

The irony is that New York City, the nation's so-called progressive capital, has continued to lose ground.

Communities like Boston, Portland Oregon, Seattle and San Francisco have enacted paid parental leave. So have less likely places such as Kansas City, Missouri, and Ferndale, Michigan.

Private employers have also recognized that paid parental leave helps recruit and retain employees.

Amazon, Netflix and Ikea now offer paid leave for moms and dads. So do traditional stores like Lowe’s and Nordstrom, which have leave policies that recognize dads and adoptive parents. Even Walmart — hardly known as a labor-friendly employer — provides paid leave for moms and dads.

This past January, New York State sailed past New York City when its paid family leave policy took effect. It is a broader benefit, one that includes paid parental leave, and is for private sector employees. This year started the state policy's four-year rollout.

Unionized municipal employees, including New York City public school educators, are not covered under the state plan. We still need to negotiate with our employer, the City of New York.

And so here we are without a paid parental leave policy more than two years after the mayor's announcement, with more families harmed every day that goes by without an agreement.

We deeply appreciate the City Council's interest in this issue. And while it is not the Council's role to be at the negotiating table with the city's municipal unions, your voices do make a difference.

We hope with your help we can convince the city's Office of Labor Relations to stop stalling and negotiate a fair paid parental leave policy so the people who care for the city's children in city schools can care for their own as well.

Testimony of Carolyn Dugan

My name is Carolyn Dugan, and I am a special education teacher in Manhattan at PS/IS 180. I am here today to advocate for paid parental leave for New York City educators and all city employees.

I am here speaking up today because I do not want any other parents to have to go through what I did.

Flash back to two years ago, for the birth of my younger daughter Daphne. I went into labor at my school because I was trying to save all my sick days for my maternity leave.

I wanted to maximize the little time I had with my newborn, so instead of taking a few days to rest before the baby was born, I worked up to very last moment and I ended up going into labor at work.

I was in labor at school in the morning, and that night I gave birth to Daphne.

Up until that last day, I was commuting to work via LIRR and the subway, which as you know is not always the easiest of commutes.

At work during my pregnancy, I still spent most of the day on my feet teaching, and up and down stairs all day long to work with different students all over the building. As I did all of this, I was also combating never-ending morning sickness. Yet taking a day off was never a possibility for me because I needed to save my days so I could use them after I had my baby.

As crazy as all this sounds, it is not that unusual. Teachers go into labor at school because they are hoarding their sick days. I was saving my sick days because of the antiquated maternity leave policy the Department of Education uses.

The current maternity leave policy is that if you want to remain on payroll, you have to save your sick days and use them as your maternity leave, paying for it yourself with your own sick days.

I had used up all my saved sick days with the birth of my first child, Penelope. For the birth of my second child, Daphne, I had to borrow sick days from the Department of Education, which I will have to pay back.

Even after borrowing the days, it was not enough to stay out the recommend eight weeks after my C-section. I returned to the classroom after seven weeks because I could not afford to go off payroll.

I was still in pain from the surgery and was operating on sometimes a total of two hours of sleep each night because some babies don’t know the difference between day and night.

At school, I was up and down stairs all day long and on my feet for most of the day except during lunch. As I ate my lunch, I was also pumping breast milk to leave for my baby while I worked.

The most difficult part of all this was leaving my 9-pound, seven-week-old baby to go to work because otherwise I would not be paid.

We are educators caring for children all day, but yet we are not afforded the ability to stay home and take care for our own children. We are being forced to decide between our children at school and our children at home. It’s a choice no one should have to make.

It’s time for New York City to provide paid parental leave to members of the United Federatio nof Teachers and other city employees.

Testimony of Jessica Jean-Marie

My name is Jessica Jean-Marie, and I have been teaching in New York City public schools for nine years. I am a dean at a high school, as well as a special education teacher.

I choose to tell my story not because there is anything extenuating or extraordinary about it; on the contrary, my story is the most average and ordinary story of those who have sought and taken maternity leave.

I choose to tell my story to give voice to the thousands of us who have taken maternity leave at a financial risk; the thousands of us who couldn’t afford to stay out and returned to work after a short six weeks; the thousands of us who aren’t women, but desperately want to be home to bond with our children; the thousands of us who choose to adopt and need the time to support the transition of our children.

It is through this lens that I hope to connect with you and express how many of us there are and why parental leave is so desperately needed for teachers. Last week, I returned from maternity leave after 11 weeks from having my second child. I tried working until I went into labor so that I could have a full 12 weeks — six weeks using sick days and six weeks off payroll on unpaid child care leave — at home with my son. I couldn’t do it. The physical pain and the mental stress became too much.

As you know, teenagers are in constant movement and have a lot of energy. Trying to do dean work, while nine months pregnant put me in constant danger—from the students running around in the hallway and one nearly knocking me over, to the elevator going out of service and having to climb up to the fourth floor where my school is located, to a fight breaking out, to managing emergency fire drills and evacuations—three occurring in one day.

I worked up until the week of my due date, hoping my son would come sooner than later so I can maximize my leave. He arrived three days past due.

I then had to figure out how many days I would have to borrow: Do I borrow enough to cover my first six weeks and be indebted to the DOE? Or do I not borrow any days and take the financial hit? Can I afford to do that, in addition to paying for child care for my first child? Should I consider going back to work once my baby reached six weeks so I wouldn’t have to go off payroll and be too deep in a financial hole?

The amount of questions, concerns, worries and stressors that a new parent has to carry is never-ending; working for an institution that is built on the basis of caring for children should not add onto that.

It seems counterintuitive to have to provide reasons why teachers should have a reasonable and stronger parental leave plan: being able to provide for my children allows me to be saner, which then allows my students to have an educator who can give from a full and sane cup.

We live in a city that prides itself on being a home to innovators and leaders of progressive action. We have a mayor who has made it his agenda to recognize that a sane society includes systems that allow people to take care of their family-whether through UPK or renovating the city’s parental leave plan. Educators however, are somehow left out.

The work that we do is deep and long, and can never be accurately measured. For us to do this well and to show up 100% for our students, we need the financial security to take care of our own. I ask you to not only think about the immediate benefits and necessities that our families will gain, but the long term effects our students and city will get when they have educators who are able to focus on their needs, instead of financial instability.

Testimony of Eric Rubin-Perez

My name is Eric Rubin-Perez, and I have been a school counselor at the John F. Kennedy Jr. School in Queens for the past 14 years.

I met my now husband in the spring of 2004. He was also in the field of education, working as a school psychologist in a school district on Long Island. It was our passion for education and love of children that made us perfectly suited for each other. It was natural that we would want a family of our own. We decided we wanted to create our family through a gestational surrogate. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s when an embryo is created from a separate egg donor and the sperm of my husband or myself and then implanted into another woman. Yes, very complicated and also very expensive. Since we were a gay couple our insurance covered none of the medical expenses, and we were not eligible for any of the tax benefits we would have been had we been a heterosexual couple. The only way this was going to happen for us was to work hard and save. Not an easy task for two public school educators.

In the surrogate world, they call the path one takes in order to have their child “their journey.” We quickly found out the reason behind this. After eight long years, we finally managed to save up the necessary money. However, it was not a smooth ride. After one failed transfer, three months later we were thrilled to be pregnant only to have it end in disappointment after a miscarriage. We watched the funds we had worked so hard to save disintegrate. Determined to accomplish our dreams, we decided to continue forward and used our credit card to finance the necessary funds.

The third time was the charm for us. In the summer of 2013, we were over the moon to be pregnant with twins. However, once again heartbreak would rear its ugly head. At the 10-week sonogram, we learned that one of our twins had not survived. Although we were heartbroken at this loss, we were thrilled that we were finally on our way to becoming parents.

As the months went by, we started planning for our daughter’s arrival. At this point in my career, I had managed to save over 65 days in my bank that I had always planned on using for child care leave. I attended a UFT workshop on paternity leave in the fall of 2013. To my shock, I learned that as a father I was only allowed to use three personal days. It didn’t matter how many days I had saved in my bank, I was not able to use any of them. All those times I made the treacherous commute in the snow to my school in Elmhurst, Queens, from my home in Suffolk County, or when I came back to work after oral surgery didn’t matter, because I could not use any of my days. My husband who worked on Long Island got six weeks of paid paternity leave so it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t get anything.

Putting our daughter in day care at six weeks, when my husband’s paternity leave ended, was not an option for us. We had worked too hard to get to this point. We decided for me to take an unpaid child care leave for 11 weeks.

On March 12, 2014, at 8:12 p.m., our lives changed forever in the best possible way. We welcomed our first child, Ellie Renee Rubin-Perez. It was worth it all.

However, being without pay for my new family was traumatic, and it took a very long time to get out of the financial hole that we found ourselves in.

Being a parent is all about sacrificing; however, I found myself in a very unfair situation. Every day of my professional career, I give so much of myself to my students and the families I work with, but my needs as a new father were not taken into consideration.

Families are constantly changing and evolving. We need to adopt policies that give every parent an equal opportunity.

Thank you.