NEW YORK – The money and effort Big Labor poured into the New York City mayor’s race to support now-Mayor Bill de Blasio appears to be paying off in a big way.

The city settled a long-running contract dispute last week with the Law Enforcement Benevolent Association that will result in retroactive raises for officers averaging $50,000 each in back pay, the New York Daily News reports.

Predictably, the United Federation of Teachers union is now knocking on the mayor’s door with its hand out. UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a recent interview that unionized teachers should have a raise because they’ve been working a long time without one.

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Of course, that depends on what the union considers a “raise.”

Virtually all teacher union contracts award pay increases for educators for every additional year of service. These are known as “step raises.” Most unionized educators can also “jump” to a higher salary lane in their contract when they obtain additional college credits.

Both would be considered pay raises to normal Americans, but not to those who reside in “union-land.”

So while New York City teachers have almost certainly been climbing the pay scale in the UFT’s labor contract through individual “step” and “education” increases, the numbers on the pay chart might not have been raised in general.

That’s likely what Mulgrew is getting at.

“It’s a big issue for us,” Mulgrew told WNYC. “It’s a very large issue with us.”

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“Big” and “large” likely are good descriptors for the type of back pay the UFT is seeking from its political beneficiary, though Mulgrew said the union won’t publicly discuss its demands.

“Some estimates peg the cost of back pay for UFT members to be more than $3.2 billion,” the Daily News reports.

The news site pointed out that other city employees have been working with expired contracts since 2008, which is a good indication that other unions likely will follow the UFT’s lead if it’s successful, and there’s no indication it won’t be.

For City University of New York labor studies lecturer Ed Ott, the back pay deals are a sign that “there is real collective bargaining going on,” which he believes wasn’t the case under former mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Most rational people with a cursory knowledge of New York City politics likely would come to a much different conclusion. The city’s biggest labor unions , including the teachers union, spent heavily to elect de Blasio to office, and now de Blasio is doling out retroactive raises that likely could run into the billions.

De Blasio spokeswoman Marti Adams told the Daily News “the guiding principle of the de Blasio team moving forward is to respect workers and protect taxpayers.”

The mayor appears to “respect” workers quite a bit, but the only thing he seems to be protecting is his own political interests.