It's the Brian Larosho on WNLIC. Good morning again, everyone.

With us now, the president of the UFT, the United Federation of Teachers, that's Michael

Mogrew, who just completed a tentative five-year contract agreement with the Adams administration

last week. And now, of course, wants the 115,000 union members to vote to ratify the contract

and judging from things I've been reading and from our callers to yesterday's show,

rank and file ratification might not be automatic. The agreement includes a starting salary

increase for teachers from the current $61,000 a year to 72,000 a year. It cuts in half

the time it takes to reach $100,000 a year. Teachers will now get there with eight years

of service. In addition, the contract has annual raises in the 3% range. There are remote

learning provisions for certain situations and more. And if you were listening yesterday,

when we took teacher calls on the contract on the day off from school, our board was

flooded with teachers planning to vote no. For reasons we'll go over with Mr. Mogrew.

In fairness to him, I did say yesterday that you cannot judge public opinion by who calls

a talk show. It's usually people unhappy about something who are motivated to call. So what

we do here is thoroughly unscientific in that way. We certainly acknowledge that. But it

does start conversations and raise issues to be discussed, which is vital. And that definitely

happened here yesterday. So we will follow up today on some of what we heard. Michael Mogrew

has been the UFT president since 2009, when he succeeded Randy Weingarten, who went

on then to become president of the national union. Besides his work in the union, Mogrew

was a high school teacher in Brooklyn for about a decade and started out by going to

CUNY at the College of Staten Island, where he majored in English literature and special

ed. Michael, we always appreciate when you come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

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