Just 20 days after its previous contract with New York City expired, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew is signaling that he doesn’t think the union will easily reach agreement with the city on a new one.
The union’s delegate assembly agreed to his request to declare impasse if talks don’t improve, GothamSchools reports.
After impasse is declared, the contract moves toward mediation. If that fails, it moves to “fact finding,” in which an independent board makes recommendations for reaching a pact. GothamSchools notes that fact-finding has backed the union on a couple of issues in the past.
In any case, there are certainly a lot of hot-button issues on the table for this contract go-around. They include the absent-teacher reserve pool, the performance-pay program that then-UFT President Randi Weingarten negotiated in 2007, and with all the bad New Yorker press, possibly even the “rubber rooms” for teachers under investigation.