On WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio discusses his plans on saving a billion dollars in healthcare in order to fund salary raises for its city teachers. Although he expresses his delight in securing a preliminary deal with the United Federation of Teachers, of which silive.com said is de Blasio's first huge labor settlement, he said that he has still a long way to go to address state labor concerns.
On Thursday, de Blasio announced a nine-year initial contract agreement with the teacher's group that would include retroactive raises and classroom changes to be funded by measures to reduce healthcare costs. The report said that the UFT had not had a contract since 2009, and the nine-year contract retroactively applies to late 2009. Once the deal is ratified by the UFT, all teachers will experience a total of 18% salary increase by 2018. NY City Hall had said that with the healthcare savings measure, it will help New York bring down the cost of the contract from $5.5 billion to a net cost of $4.2 billion.
On the other hand, de Blasio is confident that its deal with the UFT will set precedent to future contract negotiations with other municipal unions. Silive.com said that should the city's Municipal Labor Committee agree to apply the healthcare savings to all municipal unions, it would reportedly save New York $3.4 billion.
De Blasio said in the show, "I think the history in this city of pattern bargaining respects the fact that when you have 152 individual unions, and a 350,000-person work force, the pattern is a way of everyone making sense of things. If in fact this deal is ratified by the teachers, and if in fact the Municipal Labor Committee supports the healthcare provisions, we will clearly have established a pattern and then I think unions will work from that assumption."
