There’s something almost theatrical about seeing a politician sue to stop a law that he pushed for in public. You can kind of picture Zohran Mamdani right now: he’s the new mayor of New York City and he’s suing his own city council over a pay raise for school paraprofessionals worth $25 billion. The same pay raise he backed as a candidate not long ago.
The Zohran Mamdani teachers union’s lawsuit is about a law that the city council passed unanimously that lets paraprofessionals (school staff who help teachers and students but don’t have teaching licenses) get one-time cash payments. In order to get these so-called “RESPECT checks,” the United Federation of Teachers, which speaks for both classroom teachers and paraprofessionals, had been campaigning nonstop for more than a year, getting council candidates from all political parties to promise their support. It worked. The bill passed with no votes against it. It will cost an estimated $244 million in the first year, at a time when the mayor is already facing a $6.4 billion budget gap.
Mamdani didn’t say no to it. He let it become law and then went to court, which is not a common order for political moves. It seems like he didn’t want to get into a direct fight with the UFT because that group has the kind of institutional power that can make or break political careers in this city. Not getting into a fight at the veto stage does not mean you will not get into one at all. The administration’s legal case is based on the Taylor Law, which is New York’s law from 1967 that lets public employees bargain collectively. The mayor’s team says that any outside payment plan that skips the formal negotiation process is against the law. You can’t say they’re wrong about that.
Take a moment to think about the deeper irony in this. For decades, the UFT has been very clear about how important collective bargaining is. Their first line of defense would be the same if a city council tried to lower worker pay through legislation instead of contract talks. When politics make it seem like a good idea to skip that step, however, the union is suddenly okay with it. That is not a moral stance. The language used is opportunism dressed up as labor language.
It’s not the money that makes the Zohran Mamdani teachers union lawsuit important, though $325 million a year isn’t nothing. It sets a standard. If the courts side with the council, public-sector unions will have a powerful new tool: they will be able to get lawmakers to make concessions that they couldn’t get at the bargaining table. For good, that changes the whole equation of labor negotiations in New York City.
It’s still not clear what the courts will do about this. It’s likely that the case will go to the Court of Appeals before it is over. There’s also an uncomfortable side story: labor groups have been known to put pressure on judges they don’t think are sympathetic enough. Three years ago, they essentially sank a governor’s choice for a judge because of a procedural ruling. It’s not clear if that pressure changes how trial-level judges handle this case, which is not a good question.
There are real problems with collective bargaining. Everyone in city government knows this, but not many say it out loud. It gives a lot of power to groups whose goals don’t always match up with the public’s. But those are the rules, which have been made over many years by the unions that are now trying to get around them.
No matter what side of the labor debate you’re on, there’s one thing that everyone should agree on: Mamdani has chosen a very expensive political fight. He is going after an organization that helped get him elected for a legal reason instead of what will make the most people happy. That should happen more often.
