The Slatest

NYC Strikes Deal with Teachers’ Union, Will Give $3.4 Billion in Back Pay

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio hammers out deal with teachers union ending years-long contract stalemate.

Photo by Susan Watts-Pool/Getty Images

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city and its largest teachers’ union had struck a deal on a new contract on Thursday. The agreement ended a more than four-year impasse that left the union without a contract. After acrimonious negotiations with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio took office with close ties to the city’s unions. In fact, during Bloomberg’s term things got bad enough, the Associated Press reports, that “many of the [city’s] unions ended negotiations in recent years, preferring to wait for a new mayor who might have warmer relations with them, and all of their contracts had expired by the time Bloomberg left office.”

Here’s more on the deal from the New York Times:

The deal, hammered out in marathon negotiations this week, will grant $3.4 billion in back pay to the union, the United Federation of Teachers, in exchange for a substantial reduction in health care costs and an easing of classroom work rules that have long frustrated city officials. Teachers will also receive raises totaling 10 percent over seven years.

The agreement must still be ratified by the union’s 100,000 members who teach in New York’s public school system that is by far the largest in the country with more than 1 million students.