Walking my kids to their first day of school brought the unwelcome news that PS 45, on Staten Island, is down to two crossing guards. We used to have (and still need) four. This is a system-wide problem, as the city reports nearly 200 unfilled posts, even after former Mayor Eric Adams cut 500 vacant crossing guard lines as a budget gimmick in 2024.
Crossing guards’ pay starts $18 an hour. One reason why the pay barely exceeds minimum wage is the Office of Labor Relations’ strict policy of pattern bargaining over wages across city agencies, in which the first union to settle a contract with the city — be it teachers, cops or DC37 — sets the pattern for the upper-most across-the-board pay increase that the city will pay any other union.
City negotiators are currently trying to keep wage increases under 4% in 2026. Most crossing guards, limited to five hours a day, earn $23,400 a year. A 4% raise would be just $936. Compare that to the $2,435 that a newly hired NYPD rookie would get (on a $60,884 salary). A five year veteran would see a raise of more than $5,000, while sergeants at the top of the pay scale would get more than $6,000. These percentage increases are compounded so that the lowest-paid workers fall further behind their better-paid peers over time.
Why is the city insisting on a wage policy that exacerbates income inequality? The reasons are historical, and increasingly outdated. The 1975 fiscal crisis was blamed on city unions that had been leapfrogging contracts with threatened and actual strikes in order to raise pay and benefits for their members. Pattern bargaining was a way of pitting unions against each other to freeze or squeeze wages. It was a hallmark of Mayor Ed Koch’s anti-labor policy, and embraced by the Republican mayors who followed him.
Today, union negotiators try to get around the pattern with gimmicks like non-pensionable “retention bonuses” and new step increases. While city jobs reward longevity, the problem with crossing guards is that not enough workers are willing to start the job at such low pay or else quit after a short time.
The United Federation of Teachers has a similar problem with its paraprofessional members (a teacher aide’s starting salary is just $33,222). Michael Mulgrew’s end-run, a City Council bill offering paras a $10,000 bonus, is currently being fought in court by Mayor Mamdani — creating a significant rupture between the otherwise pro-union mayor and an important ally.
Mamdani displayed a remarkable talent for innovation in Worker Power with his Labor Day announcement of a new city department to help private sector workers “demand better working conditions on the job.” Why, then, does our socialist mayor delegate his administration’s response to public sector workers’ efforts to “improve their working conditions” to career bureaucrats with a slavish devotion to a get-tough-on-unions policy beloved by Republicans?
The Mamdani administration should pioneer a new approach to pattern bargaining. Pattern raises are really just cost of living adjustments (COLAs), meant to keep rising consumer costs from eroding workers’ purchasing power.
But the increasing inequality produced by across-the-board raises cries out for an additional system of compensation: structural inequality adjustments (SIAs). Negotiators should have leeway to target lower-paid employees for additional SIA increases to keep them from losing more ground. Special consideration should be given to essential workers like school crossing guards, who keep our kids safe, and paraprofessionals, who are a crucial part of the formula for student success.
[This article originally appeared in the New York Daily News.]