A Tale of Two Internet Sites

Unity threatens me with civil and criminal penalties for exercising my First Amendment rights, but allows their own to do pretty much whatever

It was the best of intentions, it was the worst of intentions. And guess which ones are consistently reflected in UFT Unity? Well that depends, of course, on your point of view. And your point of view is colored by A. whether you feel the purpose of union is to improve working conditions, or B. whose payroll you happen to be on.

There are two UFTs. There is the one you and I are part of. Then, there is the Unity Caucus. They make more money than us. They have easier jobs than we do. And their pensions beat the hell out of ours. They don’t have to worry about the 10K per couple it will cost, if they win, to keep real Medicare. They don’t have to worry about tiered care, premiums, or exploding copays that will inflict rank and file, or non-Medicare retirees.

They are the elite, the privileged, the one percent. (Except they’re probably even less than one percent.) And then, there are the rest of us.

I, for example, am just a lowly teacher. That said, I am an American teacher, and as such, have First Amendment rights. They include the right to parody people, even if one of them is His Holiness, Michael Mulgrew. High school students are taught that. The Very Smart UFT lawyers must have been sick that day (as well as whenever they covered it in law school).

I know this because after I parodied Mulgrew, lawyers paid by my union dues came after me. In fairness, I knew my rights. I found their claims ridiculous and posted their letter on my old blog. I thought they had a point about copying Mulgrew’s “digital signature” so I removed that. The rest is still there.

However, their contention that I was impersonating Michael Mulgrew was outlandish. Anyone who reads this and believes Michael Mulgrew wrote it is, well, intellectually challenged. Of course, the intent of the lawyers was simply to intimidate me, to shut me up.

Imagine paying your union to have lawyers quash your ideas. It goes against everything union is for. Union exists to expand, to amplify your voice. Of course, if your union leaders conspire with your employer to demean your health care, it’s worth complaining about. (Ask me why we align with Marianne Pizzitola and NYC Retirees, even as the Unity 1% condemn us for it.) Leadership like that needs to be replaced. A few short months ago, the Retired Teachers Chapter decided to do just that.

Very shortly after I posted my response to the lawyer’s letter, my old domain, nyceducator.com, was blocked from connecting to the blog. I’m not a great believer in coincidence. Who wanted to silence me? I strongly suspect the lawyers followed up with a cease and desist to Blogger. I could be wrong. Regardless, the fact is Snowflake-in-Chief Michael Mulgrew, along with the “Very Smart People” from Unity Caucus paid lawyers to silence me.

Well, Mulgrew, I’m here now, with thousands more readers. You helped me play some small part in winning back our chapter. Thank you for that inadvertent favor. Still, your actions shows absolute disregard for members. Two-thirds of RTC sides with me.

On the other hand, or website perhaps. there is the UFT Official Facebook Group for the RTC. That is run by one Susan Pulice, a Unity member. The most recent number I can find suggests our dues pay her in excess of 38K per year, along with perhaps a UFT pension.

There are good reasons people chase after UFT gigs. First, it’s a whole lot nicer to sit at 52 Broadway than in some crumbling hundred-year-old school building. Second, teaching is a really hard job. You have to be mentally and physically agile to deal with the crippling chaos that’s always just one bad decision away.

Also, why should you be limited to a teacher salary? I recall a chapter leader meeting in Queens that outraged several of my fellow CLs. A Unity Patronage Cult member was asking us to raise money for COPE. The Cult Member made an announcement:

She says boy, if I knew how to get money out of people I could've made a lot more than I did back when I was a teacher.

I'm thinking gee, it's great that you no longer have to get by on some crappy teacher salary, like all the tens of thousands of teachers (among others) who pay to have you do Whatever It Is we pay you to do. Doubtless it can really pay off to sign a loyalty oath and become a UFT employee. Gee, I wonder why you aren't good at getting people to give you money.

Soon thereafter, I actually got a whole lot of people to sign up for COPE, as we were facing a Constitutional Convention. However, I pulled my contribution when leadership threatened me with civil and criminal penalties. While I believe strongly in union, I no longer trust the Unity Patronage Cult to handle one cent more of my money than is absolutely necessary.

In July I went to a meeting with RTC reps and UFT employees. They told us they would turn over the RTC Facebook Group to us, the elected leaders of our chapter. For reasons never explained to us, they did not simply do it then and there. Instead, they put it on hiatus for the summer, and promised we’d get it for the school year.

Now, they say, they don’t own the site. It’s in the name of Susan Pulice. There are compelling reasons why RTC should take over the site. They’ve been laid out, in pretty graphic detail, over at The Wire. Let’s not overlook the disparate treatment of regular UFT members, like me and you, as opposed to elite, privileged Unity Cult members, who’ve signed an oath to have one another’s backs.

You could argue that every single person who signed up on Official RTC Facebook site, myself included, expected it to be a UFT site. You could argue that they did not, in fact, sign up for “The Social Spot—A Unity Community for Retirees.” You could, in fact, argue, that by walking with 6300 subscribers, a fraud had been committed on those who signed up. You could argue they have stolen our built-in base, and that Unity is fine with that.

You could argue that this site represented itself as a union-sanctioned site. You could argue that the union announced as much in New York Teacher. You could argue that Pulice, by asserting ownership, was actually robbing the union of a resource created in the name of the United Federation of Teachers. You could, in fact, argue that ownership of the site was meaningless, and that the only important factor was who administrated the site. (Because that’s a fact, Jack.)

How good are these arguments? Could you make them in court? I haven’t got a clue.

Regardless, every single one of these them makes more sense than the outlandish assumption that I was impersonating Michael Mulgrew. I’ll bet you dimes to dollars that UFT lawyers did not send Susan Pulice a letter threatening her with civil and criminal penalties. Furthermore, the fact that the site is still up means no one sent a cease and desist to Facebook.

It’s pretty clear Unity treats its own better than they treat rank and file. It’s pretty clear they have no issue stealing our site and relabeling it a Unity site. When you’re Unity, you can do pretty much whatever, as long as you sign the oath and take no Gods before Michael Mulgrew. If you suppress points of view, like the fact that the overwhelming majority of RTC wants to retain real Medicare, maybe you get a raise and a promotion.

We hear a lot of talk about equity. Sometimes we even hear it at the UFT Delegate Assembly. It appears Unity has one set of rules for themselves, and another for the rest of us. They’re the ruling party, and we are the peasants.

That’s about as far as you can get from the notion of unionism. When the bosses demean our health care, that’s not unionism. When they pay themselves salaries high enough that our health cuts won’t matter to them, that’s not unionism. When they attack us for helping ourselves because they can’t be bothered to help us, that’s not unionism either.

Unity has a lot of damn gall lecturing us about whom we may affiliate with. We are fighting to make things better for us, and for rank and file. If our so-called leaders won’t help us, we’ll help ourselves.

We are union. We are unionists. We will fight for our brothers and sisters, not for the coffers of Eric Frigging Adams. When Adams goes away, we will still fight for our brothers and sisters. Mulgrew can go away too.

Next May, let’s do ourselves the great favor of sending him back to Staten Island to put up drywall, or whatever it is he does. You’d better believe there’s no way he’s going back into a classroom to go through Danielson evaluations and do real work.

There’ll be no more enabling Unity aristocracy while we beg for scraps. We will be a real union, as opposed to the company union we’ve been devolving into for at least these last twenty years.

We’re coming for you, Mulgrew. Tell your cult to go back and review Danielson. We’re not drinking your Kool-Aid anymore.

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