Mulgrew's Pettiness Project Persists

UFT Unity travels to Philly, excluding not only our chapter, but even our chapter leader.

UFT Unity, Michael Mulgrew, and their BFFs in the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), sold out our health care. As a result, they overwhelmingly lost the Retired Teacher Chapter election. Since then, Mulgrew has been having an extraordinary and prolonged temper tantrum, excluding us from the Town Hall, sabotaging the signs we’d designed for the Labor Day Parade, and wasting a whole lot of our chapter leader’s time with bureaucratic petty nonsense.

The official UFT Facebook retiree group was unceremoniously suspended the very day we took office, and Unity has been unable, or more likely unwilling, to get it back up and under new management. And however you may feel about the presidential race, it’s unconscionable that Unity leadership would deliberately exclude the Retired Teacher Chapter (or at the very least, our chapter leader) from participating in a campaign event memorialized on the UFT Twitter page.

Just days ago, they took a bus to Philadelphia to do door-knocking. They didn’t bother to inform RTC chapter leader Bennett Fischer. Even if it was planned for just Mulgrew and staffers, there’s no excuse for excluding Bennett. And if they really wanted to help the cause, scale counts They could’ve easily sent an email to RTC. As for the future, there will be buses to caucus, and retirees can go, I suppose. However there is no retiree-specific bus until October 26th, mere days before the election.

There is precedent for UFT sending staffers places, and then posting photos, as though there were widespread participation. UFT was there at the SAG-AFTRA protests in Manhattan, and staffers posed for photos. I saw them, because I was there too. I don’t recall where I heard about it, but it certainly wasn’t from UFT. Norm Scott and I showed up and marched.

Why on earth couldn’t UFT have sent an email asking members to show support? Unlike events in PA, no one had to even hire a bus. Or is the point just to send a few paid staffers to events and make it appear our union supported this or that action? This begs the question—are we out supporting labor and unionism, or are we simply creating photo ops?

As for the Presidential campaign, I am acutely aware some readers of this column disagree with the UFT endorsement. That is your right. I sometimes disagree with UFT endorsements as well. That said—I strongly support Harris, and I’ve contributed multiple times to her campaign. I’m an advocate for Medicare, and Project 2025 wants to make Medicare Advantage the default. Such a policy could mean the end of the traditional Medicare for which we’re fighting. Trump has pushed the privatization of Medicare in the past. Furthermore, his record on labor is abysmal.

Biden has made small improvements to Medicare, opposed by the GOP, including a 2K cap on prescriptions beginning in 2025. (The new cap could be handy, because beginning in January, retirees will be facing the Mulgrew Tax, unprecedented co-pays on GHI Senior Care.) I believe Harris will continue to improve it as she can, depending upon the makeup of Congress. GOP, with the right makeup, could reverse the prescription cap. Vance wants people who get sick to pay more for insurance, a giant step backward.

Another big issue for me, as a lifelong public educator, is public education. Project 2025 wants to eliminate the Department of Education and Title 1, replacing it with “choice,” a voucher program that would likely cripple public school funding. It’s done so in some states already. I’ve heard Trump express admiration for such states.

The GOP platform endorses eliminating teacher tenure and enforcing merit pay. Merit pay has been around for over a hundred years and has never worked anywhere. It’s really a way to avoid paying teachers a fair salary. Last time Trump was President, he made anti-public education zealot Betsy DeVos Education Secretary.

If I haven’t persuaded you, I don’t suppose I will. I don’t suppose you’ll persuade me either. Regardless, if it’s a union action, we’re part of the union. We deserve, at the very least, the choice of whether or not to participate.

We pay dues, and we as such merit the respect of leadership. It’s not our fault we overwhelmingly defeated them in the last election. It is very much their fault, for selling us out and losing our trust. And every petty, paranoid step they take to exclude us is another step toward their loss of the overall election next May.

I can’t wait.