Dracula's Castle

At 52 Broadway, they smile and nod. But we watch what they do.

We, the elected officers of the Retired Teacher Chapter, have now visited 52 Broadway on two occasions. Everyone was nice to us. They smiled, and they said they wanted to help us. They gave Bennett Fischer, our elected CL, an office. They also gave us two smaller ones where people could answer email, and they gave us 20 paid hours a week for that to happen.

They thought they were being very generous, I suppose. Me, I’m not persuaded the only role of the ten elected officers should be answering email. For example, someone has to tell members what’s actually going on. That’s one reason I keep writing whether they pay me or not.

When I was on Executive Board, UFT paid my parking and travel expenses. It costs me around twenty bucks to go to Manhattan, between LIRR and subway. When I first asked them to reimburse me, they seemed surprised and brushed it off. The second time I asked, they said they could not reimburse expenses for people being paid to work there. I pointed out I was not being paid. They all smiled.

Oddly, UFT has somehow found enough money to pay for oh, 700 people to go to the AFT Convention in Houston this week. They pay their flights, their lodging, and their meals. But reimbursing me 40 bucks would have broken the bank. Here’s the thing—I’ll keep going regardless. Why?

I love that quote. When I was chapter leader of Francis Lewis High School, UFT leadership was not responsive to my members’ concerns. That’s why they and others found themselves reading about them in the NY Daily News and elsewhere. When Unity Tom Murphy’s RTC, for years, pretended that Medicare Advantage was the bestest thing ever, I wrote about it in the Daily News, in Gotham Gazette, and elsewhere.

They can ignore us, and they can be petty, but they can’t and won’t stop us. Randi Weingarten comes to UFT, and announces, “We hear you.” Those are her words. Does she mean it? Here’s an example suggesting she does not, in fact, hear us at all. A piece, published by AFT yesterday, says the following:*

Tom Murphy, retiree chapter leader of the United Federation of Teachers and chair of the AFT Retirees program and policy council, spoke about the historic nature of the AFT’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, the high stakes of the 2024 election and how retirees can use their decades of organizing experience to fight for the future of our nation.

Interesting. According to the American Federation of Teachers, Tom Murphy is retiree chapter leader of the UFT. Maybe Randi just forgot to tell everyone he lost the election by a 2-1 margin. Who knows? It could’ve just slipped her mind. But she said she heard us.

Here’s something more interesting. According to the above quote, Tom Murphy is the “chair of the AFT Retirees program and policy council.” Nice work if you can get it. I’ll bet they’re paying him the 75K he won’t be making at the UFT job. Or who knows? Maybe the UFT is still paying him even though we’ve bounced him.

That’s not as important as the fact that AFT has decided to give Murphy a job representing retirees. The UFT chapter has overwhelmingly rejected Murphy, and on that basis Randi Weingarten has somehow seen fit to grant him a leadership position in our national union. Weingarten, evidently, clearly could not give a golly gosh darn about representing us.

We have drawn a line in the sand about our health care. Did AFT do anything about that? Was there a resolution? Of course there wasn’t. The agenda, the prime directive, is to keep loyal Unity members on payroll, any payroll, while nodding their heads, smiling, and paying us lip service.

Michael Mulgrew, while claiming to now oppose the advantage program, has done absolutely nothing to keep it from happening. In my capacity as Vice Chair of the RTC Chapter, I wrote him a letter, specifically explaining what needed to be done if he wished to support us. Mulgrew ignored it.

Randi Weingarten is another influential figure who could help us. As former UFT President, she surely has local contacts. She could lobby the City Council. She could lobby the State Legislature. That, evidently, not worth pursuing. What’s important to Weingarten and Mulgrew, evidently, is dishing out patronage gigs to Tom Murphy, ostensibly representing membership even as we overwhelmingly reject his positions.

If that’s not spitting in our faces, I don’t know what is. They can give us happy talk. They can go behind our backs and grant sinecures to all their good buddies, thinking we aren’t paying attention. They can do a lot of things. But we are watching them, every step of the way.

Next year, we will vote Mulgrew, or whoever his hand-picked successor may be, out of office And Weingarten can give them all paying gigs, if she feels like it. But when we win next year, we’ll have votes at AFT as well.

We’re not as dumb as they think we are. They underestimate us at their peril.

*AFT has fixed the piece, but we saved a screenshot: