Time well earned

In 2018 America, no city should force the parents it employs to exhaust their sick leave to spend precious time home with newborn babies.

Mayor de Blasio and United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew get credit for righting that wrong, and ensuring that, come September, public school teachers here will get six paid weeks off, with an additional six weeks available to birth parents provided they’ve squirreled away enough sick days — which isn’t hard, since these pile up 10 days every year indefinitely.

Well done. But — are there any math teachers in the house? — don’t buy the mayor’s line that family time, paid for by a $51-million-a-year city contribution to the UFT, comes without cost.

Yes, the city will extend by two-and-a-half months the UFT’s existing contract, delaying raises on the horizon for years to come; it will also not pay into pensions during leaves. Yet the city budget assumes (as if ) just a 1% raise. Pushing that back would yield peanuts.

Bet that de Blasio and Mulgrew have already implicitly bargained for a more generous hike.