There is a lesson buried in the lawsuit now working its way through New York courts, and it is not a complicated one: when you buy a socialist, you do not own him. He owns you.
In 2025, the United Federation of Teachers — New York City’s largest teachers’ union, representing over 200,000 members — endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor. He won. This summer, the City Council unanimously passed the RESPECT Check Act, which would provide up to a $10,000 bonus to the city’s education paraprofessionals: the teachers’ aides and instructional assistants who work with disabled students, typically for starting salaries around $33,000 that cap out near $56,000 after fifteen years of service. These are not lavishly compensated people. The Council vote was unanimous. It was the kind of bill that should have been a layup.
Mamdani blocked it. His administration argued the law violates the Taylor Act, which governs collective bargaining for public employees, and filed suit on August 19 to prevent the bonuses from taking effect. Six days later, the union filed a motion to intervene on the other side of the litigation — suing the mayor they helped elect.
Mamdani’s stated position is that he supports better pay for paraprofessionals, but insists the path runs through contract negotiations with his office, not the City Council. This is the argument of a man who wants credit for a promise while controlling whether it is ever kept.
It is worth noting that this is not the only Mamdani campaign commitment that has dissolved on contact with reality. He promised free buses. The buses are still not free, because the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is run by the state, not the city — a fact that was true before, during, and after the campaign, and that any serious candidate for mayor would have known.
The UFT will almost certainly continue backing Democrats regardless. That is the structural reality. Teachers’ unions have poured more than $669 million into left-wing causes and campaigns since 2015, according to the watchdog group Defending Education. The machine does not stop because one election went sideways. Union leadership will absorb this, explain it, and endorse the next progressive in the primary. The dues keep flowing. The cycle continues.
But the people who actually lose in this transaction are not the union bosses. They are the paraprofessionals who got up every day and worked with the city’s most vulnerable children for wages that plateau in the mid-fifties after a decade and a half of service. They were promised something. The City Council voted unanimously to give it to them. And the mayor their union helped put in office is now in court trying to make sure they don’t get it.
Socialism, it turns out, is very good at redistribution – of money and promises.
