The other day, a mayor, two union presidents, and a schools chancellor walked onto a private jet. It was not the start of a joke; it is what actually happened when Mayor Bloomberg gave a ride to some of his toughest labor counterparts last week.
On the jet heading upstate with the mayor were teachers union President Michael Mulgrew, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan, schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, the mayor’s Press Secretary Stu Loeser, and Mulgrew’s Deputy Director of Communications Peter Kadushin.
The group of labor and management leaders was in Albany to ask the legislature not to make severe cuts to state aid to the city’s schools in the final budget that gets passed. A spokesman for the teachers union wouldn’t say what the mayor’s passengers talked about.
Last year, then-teachers union Randi Weingarten made news when she traveled on the mayor’s jet to Boston and a goose slammed into the plane.