A petition to get the UFT to negotiate with the City on maternity leave was presented at the Executive Board meeting on Monday and the union leadership,while synthetic to the needs of the younger teachers, stated that the City has not been willing to offer a reasonable deal.
Evidence that the union was actually telling the truth is that the City has already imposed a maternity leave program on their mangers and the managers are very unhappy at the cost of this provision. The City imposed maternity leave program cost the managers their 2017 raise of 0.47% and for senior managers they had to fork over two vacations days in exchange for the maternity leave.
Interestingly, the IBO did an analysis of the City's maternity leave cost on the managers and found that the City saved $5.8 million dollars the first year. The reason was that the average age of the 8,279 managers under the program is 47 years of age and few (230 or 2.7%) were able to take advantage of the maternity leave program. The IBO stated that only a few younger managers were able to take advantage of the program while all mangers were penalized by loss of raises and the senior managers with 15 or more years of experience and averaged 55 years of age lost two vacation days for a program that they probably cannot use.
When it comes to the unionized workforce, they are younger than the managers and replacing a person who takes maternity leave usually means paying overtime, rather than straight time/ Therefore, the City's terms would cost the unions too high a price for that "giveback" and so far no union has come to an agreement with the City. Until and unless the City decides that maternity leave should become a right and not a negotiated item in a contract, the prognosis for a maternity leave benefit remains bleak.
For those teachers, who were on maternity leave or other unpaid status,in October of 2015, they will finally get their first lump sum payout. However, this year's lump sum payout will not be paid until October of 2018 for teachers who were on unpaid leave back in October of 2015. Therefore, each lump sum payment will be delayed one year and those teachers will not be whole until October of 2021 instead of 2020.You can thank the union leadership for screwing those teachers on unpaid leave, be it maternity leave or other unpaid leave.
Maybe the union can correct the many wrongs of the 2014 contract in a new contract and one place to start is to negotiate with the City to allow UFT members who were on unpaid leave status, such as maternity leave to be made whole again by giving them the lump sum payments at the time all other active members get theirs.
7 comments:
Chaz, you summed it up perfectly. There will never be "paid" maternity leave for municipal unions in NYC unless there is givebacks. The perfect example of this fact is what happened to the few managers that got it. They took a hit of 2 lost sick days. I don't want to sound politically incorrect, but the UFT should not agree to any givebacks whatsoever in regard to this. I have no problem with teachers who want to have a baby, but that choice, and it is a choice, should not come out of my CAR as a child free teacher. The UFT/DOE needs to negotiate some kind of a "maternity bank" for teachers who want to have kids. The MORE folks have claimed that being in a union is one for all and all for one but I gotta call bullshit on that. Having kid is a lot different than getting sick which is unpredictable. Even sabbaticals can only be taken by teachers with at least 7 years for a half year and 14 years for a full year. The UFT/DOE needs to come up with some kind of equitable plan that does not take away days or pay from teachers who already had kids or are not planning on having kids. This topic has the potential to create a huge rift in the rank and file if the UFT agrees to givebacks in exchange for paid maternity leave.
chaz maybe you can do a piece about how "well" the city policies on bullying are doing. I'm surprised there aren't more bodies lying in the hallways!
Take Norm's pension to pay for it.
We will lose a lot of money if we lose days from our car and will we lose money if we lose our 10 sick days. I’ve done the math if you have a decent amount of days in your car. It’s an incredible amount of money. We should fight and fight hard against this. There has to be a way to not screw over people who don’t want kids, or had kids already.
We are not the same now. We get observed differently and rated differently. That sailed long ago.
Oh, they also screwed us over with medical insurance so we are spending more money on that.
Can we start a petition to get the UFT to negotiate getting my Monday and Tuesday afternoons back or at least making them count for my CTLE hours? I'd sign that petition in a second:)
The city's biggest concern regarding maternity leave will be the amount of men attempting at by any mean possible to get pregnant. This will create sex changes and other concerns. One guy in my department already told me he is taking hormone pills just in case maternity leave goes into effect.
You know what I would love to see: Just imagine a female NYC teacher married to a super rich husband. The female teacher hates her job but loves her own children so she gets pregnant every 9 months and then gets paid maternity leave just to get out of work for a few weeks every year. So awesome if that happened!
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