Opinion

Mike Mulgrew’s whopper

In his quest to get Mayor de Blasio to cough up $3.2. billion in back pay for his members, union boss Mike Mulgrew keeps claiming his people have gone without raises because Big Bad Bloomberg refused to negotiate a new contract.

The president of the United Federation of Teachers repeated the claim again this week. “We believe we should have a raise,” he said, “and we’ve been working a long time without a raise.”

What Mulgrew never tells you is that most of his members have received raises. They’ve received them because of a perversity in New York law called the Triborough Amendment, which mandates that all parts of a public union contract — including automatic “step” increases in pay — remain in effect even after a contract has expired.

A Manhattan Institute report by E.J. McMahon lays out some of the numbers since the UFT’s last contract expired in 2009:

  • Overall salary increases for teachers totaled $1.2 billion.
  • For the 57,983 teachers not already at the top of the pay scale by 2009, the average salary rose by an average $8,086.
  • The average annual raise of 2.8 percent outpaced the local inflation rate, which averaged 2 percent during the same period.

Remember, this was a time in which many New Yorkers found their own paychecks frozen. These private-sector workers — the taxpayers who pay the salaries of our teachers — don’t have the luxury of demanding back pay from their employers.

Mulgrew is free to bargain for a new contract with raises. We just wish he could acknowledge the raises his UFT members have already received.