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Mayor Bloomberg and UFT President Randi Weingarten announced a tentative contract deal last night, just in time for Weingarten’s announcement Wednesday. The agreement would roll back pension benefits for newly hired employees, but preserve benefits for current teachers. It would also scrap the two work days before Labor Day that were added to the work year in the last contract negotiation.

Not mentioned in either Bloomberg’s press release or Weingarten’s e-mail to teachers (sent late last night and obtained thanks to a helpful reader): the small matter of the $81 million-a-year Absent Teacher Reserve. That’s the pool of teachers who are the losers in the system’s new hiring market — but haven’t been able to find positions at schools.

The union and the city struck a deal to try to drain the pool in November, but the number of reserve teachers stayed basically the same.

This appears to be Weingarten’s penultimate loose end before she leaves the city to work at the national teachers union full-time. The final deal she must announce: A contract agreement with the union-represented Green Dot charter school in the Bronx, which officials are unveiling this afternoon.

Here’s how Weingarten described the new citywide labor agreement in an e-mail to teachers, followed by Bloomberg’s press release: (more…)

The Brooklyn KIPP school I’ve been focusing on isn’t the only KIPP school likely to get its first-ever labor contract, courtesy of the United Federation of Teachers. The teachers union is also pushing to negotiate a labor contract on behalf of teachers at KIPP Infinity, a middle school that got one of two of the highest grades in the city on the Department of Education’s progress reports last school year.

While the teachers at KIPP AMP in Brooklyn asked to be represented by the union, the teachers at KIPP Infinity are in a different situation. Randi Weingarten, the president of the union, told me on the phone today that the union has represented Infinity’s teachers for a while, as part of a deal through which the union provided them with health benefits through something called a “welfare fund.” (Not sure what that is.) But the union’s relationship with Infinity did not extend into the more confrontational territory of helping the teachers develop a labor contract.

Today, the union’s secretary, Michael Mendel, informed Infinity’s board members that the union wants to go there and negotiate a labor contract. Here’s the letter he wrote explaining the union’s intentions. What I’m not clear on is what sparked the union to push for a contract at Infinity: Did teachers ask for this, or was it a separate push by the union?