Health Care

NYC contract with teachers’ union includes billions in back pay

The city and teachers union are set to announce a tentative contract deal on Thursday afternoon that includes billions of dollars in retroactive pay, sources said.

United Federation of Teachers members are in line for the hefty sum going back to October 2009 — when their last contract expired.

They will get the equivalent of 4 percent retroactive hikes for each of the first two years — part of 2009 and 2010 — which alone will cost the city more than $3 billion.

The payments are expected to stretch over a number of years so as not to break the city’s bank.

From 2011 to 2018, teachers will receive a total pay raise of up to 10 percent. That means that by 2018, teacher pay will be as much as 18 percent higher than it was in 2009, according to sources.

In return, the union agreed to cost-saving measures on health care — something the administration has been insisting on for months.

But because the health care initiative would set a pattern for the other labor unions, it’s being heavily scrutinized by a union collective known as the Municipal Labor Committee.

That group’s executive board held a meeting on the UFT deal in Lower Manhattan on Thursday morning.

Teachers have been working without a contract for long­er than nearly every other municipal union.

Their new deal will iron out a number of thorny issues — including how to evaluate teachers in the wake of the bumpy rollout of the Common Core standards.

The union and administration have also had to contend with what to do with teachers shed from shrinking or closing schools.

The current system keeping them as roving substitutes, with a tab of roughly $100 million per year, had been maligned by both sides.

Among the other issues, schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña has been seeking ways to add to the school day — by maximizing instructional time rather than by lengthening it, according to sources.