In a move that seemed preordained from the date four months into his administration when he reached contract terms with the union that ended a 54-month stalemate triggered by his predecessor’s refusal to honor longstanding traditions regarding bargaining patterns and retroactive raises, the United Federation of Teachers Feb. 8 endorsed Mayor de Blasio’s re-election.
While UFT President Michael Mulgrew never specifically mentioned that contract, from the time it was reached it re-established a bond between union and Mayor that had been broken by Michael Bloomberg during his final four years in office. While he had stressed the importance of pattern bargaining during previous arbitrations in which his administration sought to limit raises for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the then-Mayor refused to give the UFT the two four-percent raises he had previously agreed to with two-thirds of the city’s workforce, including the PBA, when the Teacher-union contract expired on Nov. 1, 2009.
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