NYC teaching para-professionals reject UFT Unity Caucus leadership too.
Along with the UFT retired.
In 2012 a staff member of the Illinois Education Association approached me about making a poster for the living wage campaign that the state union supposedly was planning on launching.
If the idea of a living wage campaign for educators surprises you, it shouldn’t.
In Illinois and most other states, paras - educators who work with classroom teachers, often with special needs students - barely make what McDonald’s pays (and McDonald’s should pay a lot more).
It is definitely not a living wage.
As of Jun 11, 2024, the average hourly pay for a paraprofessional educator in Illinois was $14.74 an hour.
As of Jun 12, 2024, the average hourly pay for a full-time paraprofessional educator in New York City was $19.51 an hour.
As often happened in the IEA, the living wage campaign was launched and I never heard about it again.
A couple thousand copies of my poster were printed.
But they never went anywhere. I think I saw one pinned to a bulletin board in my union region office where I went for a meeting.
United Federation of Teacher represent paraprofessionals in New York City.
Rank and file para members’ attempts to have the Unity Caucus leadership address compensation has never gone anywhere either.
Dan Alicia in Educators of NYC
… at the March UFT delegate assembly, Unity leadership and its Unity para chapter leader allowed their caucus loyalty oaths to get in the way of voting for an original meaningful resolution written by two full-time classroom paras and myself, a special education teacher, that called for a collective bargaining plan and strategy to fight for a living wage for paras.
The original resolution not only aggressively called for lobbying for legislation that provides federal grant monies toward improving the pay and conditions of paras, but also an original resolve that they had previously gutted, that was again proposed as an amendment at last night’s DA, asking the UFT to come up with a comprehensive collective bargaining plan to fight to ensure paras receive a living wage.
When UFT retirees last week upset the incumbent Unity Caucus in an election that won the retiree challengers all 300 leadership seats, the paras also won a victory over Unity’s leadership.
Arthur Goldstein in Union Voice:
…the voting results are in, and as for slate voting, the Fix Para Pay slate got 2516 votes while Unity got 892. That tells me an overwhelming majority of paraprofessionals reject the Unity Caucus. Last year, rather than fix para pay, Unity pushed them aside, granting them a party and a handbook.
I have always believed that the principle of a union has been all for one and one for all.
The Unity Machine and other teachers union leaders have turned that principle upside down by ignoring the needs of so many classroom educators and particularly retirees and low-paid paraprofessionals.
Here in New York City both groups reminded them of that principle once again last week.