The United Federation of Teachers filed a court motion to defend a $10,000 bonus for school teaching assistants, directly opposing Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on the very pay raise he is now suing to stop.
The UFT's legal filing, dated August 25, asks a Manhattan state Supreme Court judge for permission to intervene in a lawsuit the Mamdani administration brought last week against the RESPECT Check Act, a City Council law that grants roughly 10,000 school paraprofessionals a $10,000 annual pay bump. The union backed Mamdani during his mayoral campaign. Now it is fighting him in court over a promise he made to win its endorsement.
UFT lawyer Charles Moerdler wrote in the filing:
"As the representative of the paraprofessionals, the UFT should be permitted to defend the interests of its members in this important legal proceeding."
The filing puts the city's largest teachers union on a direct collision course with the mayor it helped elect, and exposes a widening gap between Mamdani's campaign rhetoric and his governing record.
During his 2025 campaign, Mamdani stood alongside UFT leaders and explicitly promised to support the legislation. He told supporters at the time:
"I will be proud to continue to support the passage of Intro Bill 1261... that addresses the fact that there are too many open positions right now for paraprofessionals across the city because that job simply doesn't pay enough."
The City Council passed the RESPECT Check Act unanimously. Every member voted yes. Mamdani did not sign it, but he did not veto it either, which would have sent it back to the Council for an override vote. Instead, the law took effect without his signature.
Then his administration filed suit to block it.
That sequence, promise, silence, lawsuit, is difficult to read as anything other than a politician trying to have it both ways. Mamdani wanted the UFT's endorsement and the progressive credibility of backing low-paid school workers. But once the bill's $324 million price tag landed on his desk, he moved to kill it through the courts rather than take the political hit of a public veto.
It is not the first time Mamdani's administration has faced legal pushback over its own policy choices. Immigrant bodega owners have sued the city over his government-run grocery store plan, and that initiative has drawn its own wave of criticism.
Paraprofessionals, classroom aides who work directly with some of the city's highest-need students, including children with disabilities, start at $33,000 a year. After 15 years on the job, their pay tops out at $56,000. In a city where a one-bedroom apartment routinely rents for more than $2,000 a month, those numbers speak for themselves.
Council Speaker Julie Menin and Councilwoman Carma De La Rosa, both Manhattan Democrats, issued a joint statement defending the law:
"Every member of the Council, in a unanimous and bipartisan vote, supported the RESPECT Check Act because it is unacceptable that paraprofessionals who support some of our highest-need students are earning as little as $32,000 a year."
UFT president Mike Mulgrew has made lifting the low pay of paraprofessionals a top union priority. The motion to intervene signals the union is prepared to spend legal resources defending the bonus, and to publicly break with a mayor it helped put in office.
Mamdani's administration is not the only part of his agenda generating courtroom battles. Multiple lawsuits have targeted the city over his broader policy initiatives, a pattern that raises questions about the legal durability of his governing approach.
The administration's lawsuit claims the RESPECT Check Act violates the Taylor Law, the New York State statute that has governed public-employee labor relations for nearly sixty years. The Taylor Law requires public employers and unions to negotiate in good faith on mandatory subjects of bargaining, including compensation. Mamdani's legal team argues the City Council bypassed that process by legislating a pay increase directly.
Mamdani spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach framed the suit as a defense of orderly labor negotiations:
"At the same time, the City has a responsibility to protect the collective bargaining process. We filed suit to ensure that negotiations between the City and its workforce remain at the bargaining table rather than being decided through political intervention."
Rauschenbach also acknowledged the pay problem the law was designed to fix, saying the administration had been "having productive negotiations with the UFT to permanently address this inequity."
But the UFT's court filing undercuts that framing. If the union itself, the very party Mamdani claims to be protecting through the bargaining process, wants the legislated bonus to stand, the administration's argument that it is safeguarding collective bargaining rings hollow. The union is not asking to be saved from the City Council. It is asking the court to let the bonus go through.
The contradiction goes deeper. Mamdani did not veto the bill when he had the chance. A veto would have been the straightforward move for a mayor who believed the legislation was legally defective. The Council could have overridden it, and with a unanimous vote already on the books, almost certainly would have, but at least the mayor's position would have been clear. Instead, Mamdani let the law take effect and then sued to block it. That is not principled governance. It is an attempt to avoid accountability on both sides of the issue.
Meanwhile, accusations of fueling antisemitism and an ethics complaint alleging misuse of city resources have added to the political turbulence surrounding Mamdani's young administration.
The pay bump for approximately 10,000 paraprofessionals carries a total estimated cost of $324 million. That is real money, even by New York City budget standards, and it is fair to ask how the city plans to pay for it. Mamdani's administration has not publicly detailed what programs would be cut or what revenue would cover the expense.
But fiscal caution is not what the mayor ran on. He ran on supporting this exact legislation. He accepted the UFT's endorsement on the strength of that promise. And now the union that helped elect him is hiring lawyers to hold him to his word.
No court date has been publicly announced for either the lawsuit or the UFT's motion to intervene. The case will play out in Manhattan state Supreme Court, where a judge will have to decide whether a unanimous City Council can legislate a pay increase for public employees or whether the Taylor Law reserves that power exclusively for the bargaining table.
For the 10,000 paraprofessionals who show up every day to classrooms across New York City, earning less than many entry-level retail workers, the legal arguments are secondary. They were promised a raise by the man who wanted their union's backing. They got a unanimous vote from the Council. And now the same mayor who stood at the podium and pledged his support is the one standing in the courthouse trying to take it away.
When a politician's campaign promises expire before his first term does, voters have a word for that. It is not "collective bargaining."