Demand a Better Contract Negotiation Strategy

The UFT's current contract campaign undermines the leverage we need to secure a good contract

UFT members in the DOE have worked with an expired contract since September. A tentative agreement appears imminent, but will it be good? Probably not. At a minimum, a good contract would include a wage increase in real dollars. I expect UFT officials, however, to announce sub-inflation raises—in other words, a pay cut. After all, a contract is only as good as the contract campaign, and the UFT has designed a poor one. The campaign is missing features as basic as demands and actions that credibly threaten consequences for the Mayor for withholding a good deal. So, UFT readers, we should prepare to vote no. Instead, we should keep our union at the bargaining table and advocate for a new contract campaign built on strike readiness.

Currently, our leverage is minimal. The boss knows what they can get away with because they heard it from the union itself. Ever since DC 37 negotiated 3% salary raises, UFT officials have reiterated over and over again that the union will honor that pattern. Additionally, the Mayor and the DOE know that UFT officials want a contract by the end of June. As much as we’d like an agreement as soon as possible, more important is a contract that’s actually good. The union officials’ emphasis here is misplaced; it signals to the boss that union negotiators prioritize finishing negotiations over persisting for the best outcome possible. Lastly, the Mayor and DOE know that the UFT officialdom’s opposition to the right to strike is adamant. In a March Delegate Assembly, the union bureaucracy gave impassioned pleas against a resolution to campaign for the right to strike. Thus, across the bargaining table, DOE negotiators see union bureaucrats who champion healthcare cuts, embrace sub-inflation raises, decline to make their demands public, desire to wrap up negotiations and go home, and who celebrate the surrender of labor’s greatest weapon. Why would the city concede anything to them?

Surely city negotiators feel little pressure from the contract campaign to grant costly concessions. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” said Frederick Douglass. Yet a single demand is precisely what’s absent in the UFT’s campaign. Specifics are hidden behind a wall of non-disclosure agreements, inside the union’s hand-picked negotiating committee whose work we must “honor,” we are told, by muting suggestions on the direction of the contract campaign. This extreme version of closed bargaining contrasts sharply with that of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF). The UESF publishes bargaining reports describing progress on specific proposals after each negotiation session. UFT officials, on the other hand, claim that closed bargaining immunizes the union from attacks by the public and thus enhances our leverage. But closed bargaining serves only to protect the union bureaucracy from a rank-and-file whose expectations and persistence would be buoyed by a list of demands—and thus pose an uncomfortable challenge to UFT officials to secure a good contract. In truth, closed bargaining undercuts our leverage at the bargaining table because it creates an obstacle for the rank-and-file to hold non-confrontational UFT officials accountable.

But confront the Mayor we must. This administration shamelessly cuts school budgets while letting police exceed their overtime, so it will not be shamed into concessions by UFT members wearing blue, grading papers in a public setting, and rallying at borough halls. City negotiators would instead be pressured by a contract campaign whose strategy mobilizes members into increasingly disruptive, confrontational actions based at school sites that activate larger and larger layers of members—where, as negotiations stall, rallies make way for informational pickets, walk-ins, occupations, and—yes—a strike. Now, it’s true, as UFT officials never fail to remind us, that the union is not ready to strike. However, this gap between ability and need can be bridged. It’s called organizing. By design, a contract campaign should be a series of opportunities where members learn about their collective power, build on it, and become persuaded to participate in riskier actions. Of course, UFT officials have their reasons for avoiding such a campaign. Confrontation can be costly financially and politically. But most of the UFT membership—without union salaries or union pensions to their name—have a more substantial interest in taking such risks if it means improving salaries and working conditions from which most of the union bureaucracy is shielded. 

In the likely event that the UFT announces a poor contract, it will fall to the rank-and-file opposition to initiate a Vote No campaign. Little would be gained by merely resuming negotiations, however. A Vote No campaign would only be complete with a simultaneous call for a new contract strategy designed to achieve the best possible outcome using increasingly disruptive tactics. Informational pickets, disruptive protests, strike readiness workshops, strike committees in every school building, a strike itself—we can start now building appetite and momentum for increased militancy. Some may argue that this type of talk might cause sympathetic yet overcautious members to vote yes. But members will surely vote yes if, absent a new strategy, the only thing to gain from rejecting a tentative agreement is delaying the inevitable. Power only responds to power. The purpose of our caucuses is to persuade our coworkers of this fact. A twin campaign on Vote No and strike readiness would, at best, create a mandate for a strike-ready union; at worst, plant support for one for the struggles to come.