Many if not most New York City teachers will continue receiving automatic longevity pay increases despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement today that he will “eliminate raises” for them in the next budget.

In fact, as illustrated in the following chart (provided by the mayor’s press office), city teachers are eligible for annual pay hikes — above and beyond any base pay increase — during nine of their first 10 consecutive years, and 14 of their first 22 consecutive years.  For example, quite apart from any base salary increase, a rookie teacher entering his or her second year is entitled to a longevity increase of 6.4 percent.  An eighth-year teacher receives an increase of 11.6 percent, and a teacher moving into his or her twentieth consecutive year receives an increase of 11.5 percent.  (Go here for more details on the city’s teacher pay schedule.)

Even in the absence of a new teachers’ contract, those longevity increases must be preserved under the state Taylor Law’s Triborough Amendment.  For more background on Triborough, see pp. 13-16 of the Empire Center’s 2007 report, Taylor Made: The Cost and Consequences of New York’s Public-Sector Labor Laws. In addition to this, teachers will remain entitled to a nice health benefits package–which costs nothing in its most basic form–and a guaranteed pension that they can begin collecting as early as age 55 (or 57 if hired after Jan. 1).

Bloomberg’s fiscal 2011 Executive Budget had set aside sufficient funds to expand base pay for teachers by 2 percent, while the UFT had been seeking the same 4 percent as other municipal unions received in their last contracts (a generous pattern Bloomberg himself established, incredibly, in a contract settlement announced the day after Lehman’s bankruptcy sent the economy into a tailspin in September 2008).  However, the mayor also warned that the state school aid cut proposed by Governor David Paterson in his fiscal 2010-11 state budget would force the city to lay off 4,400 teachers.  With the state budget still stalled, and with the July 1 start of the city’s next fiscal year less than a month away, the mayor couldn’t wait any longer.

Freezing base pay, Bloomberg said today, will save those 4,400 positions.  Yet he also promised that he and Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), would “go Albany and Washington to press our case to restore more education funding.”

Huh?  Under the worst-case scenario for fiscal 2011, the city’s financial plan apparently will support an average longevity pay hike of 3.3  percent a year for teachers with less than 22 years experience.  More experienced teachers already are earning over $100,000 a year.   Meanwhile, the state is forecasting that the consumer price index will increase by just over 2.2 percent in fiscal 2011; over the past year, the cost of living barely increased at all.  Four out of five New York City residents worked in private-sector industries that reduced wages last year.

So, now that the teacher base pay “freeze” is a fact, what is the remaining problem here?  For Mulgrew, the answer is obvious.  But for the mayor, the promise to seek “more education funding” from the tapped-out state and federal governments makes little sense.  In the midst of a fiscal crisis, with several years of austerity ahead, the last thing Bloomberg should be doing is pushing for outside aid to permanently expand teachers’ base salaries.