On Getting Nothing Done

and declaring victory

We’re laboring under a major misconception and failing to learn from our mistakes. I’ve seen it for some time. We all know that the DA is a scripted event. It’s certainly not a coincidence that Mulgrew regularly calls on Executive Board members, his pawns in this game.

Of course, it’s not only the DA, but also the RTC that’s failing. For example, we twice affirmed to support 1096. Despite that, we’ve done next to nothing to support it. While the resolution specifically states:

Resolved, that the Retired Teacher Chapter will organize a movement to lobby local council members via letters, phone calls, email, and social media;

At the RTC Executive Board, I proposed we start a petition to support it. The Exec. Board voted to table this and essentially do nothing instead. The only thing we did, months later, was sign one lone letter I wrote and email it to City Council members. Before doing so, the committee struck the clause that said we needed protection from our union leaders. (Heaven forbid we offend the folks who battled to dump us into Medicare Advantage.)

I remembered this when I started the movement to eliminate pharmacy premiums for retirees. Rather than bring it to the RTC, I thought I’d get a head start. We have over 6,000 signatures now, and plan to bring it to in-service members in September. I brought it to RTC Executive Board last month. They decided, rather than use the signatures we received, to ignore them and start with nothing.

I envisioned another strongly-worded letter being weakened before it was sent.Not only that, but after they struck the working petition from the resolution, a few people passed it around, rewrote it, and then no one even bothered to place it on this month’s agenda. So, once again, we accomplished nothing.

Then there are our three forays into the UFT Delegate Assembly. I’ll start with our stand against reamortization—basically stretching out pension payments to ease the city’s financial woes. Rather than present our resolution to the DA, someone agreed with Unity to add the modifier that we oppose it “at this time.” This means, of course, when it came up again this year we no longer opposed it at all. Our resolution was meaningless.

Another resolution we passed was against co-pays. I wrote the first draft. I wrote it to oppose the co-pays opposed on retirees as a result of Mulgrew’s Medicare Advantage misadventure. Somehow, after this went through the RTC meat grinder, it was repurposed for the Delegate Assembly, where it sat about a year before Mulgrew called on someone about it.

I was impressed with the speaker who motivated it. She was eloquent. That said, I’ve been paying co-pays for over 40 years, and it was inconceivable to me that we’d reverse them simply by stating we opposed them. These were collectively bargained, and in order to eliminate them, we’d have to give the city something back.

For my money, the only route toward eliminating co-pays is government-backed single payer health care. While I favor it personally, given the makeup of our government, I don’t see it as viable right now.

More viable is 1096, or whatever follows it. That would guarantee the state of retiree health care revert to what it was before Unity’s push for Medicare Advantage. How many times has RTC organized to demonstrate for 1096? How many times has the much-ballyhooed Labor Solidarity Committee joined an event? How many times have we coordinated with Marianne Pizzitola or her merry band of municipal retirees? That, my friends, would be a big fat zero.

In fact, by asking that all co-pays be reversed without even hinting at how it could be accomplished, we handed Michael Mulgrew an argument we should have anticipated—that someone would have to pay for this. Mulgrew announced it would come out of future raises. One thing Mulgrew does well is the appeal to fear.

The appeal to fear is a Unity mainstay, tried and true. While I was still in service, Mulgrew told us if we didn’t change 12-126 to reduce retiree benefits, we’d all have to pay 1500 bucks a year in premiums. (Neither happened.) This directly pitted in-service members against retirees, but that didn’t stop Mulgrew from lecturing us on how we must never, ever do that.

Unity’s Peter Goodman whipped out an appeal to fear at last week’s RTC meeting, making the outlandish assertion that if we were to seek the right for retirees to vote in trustee elections, it would entail opening up the NY State Constitution, and possibly tampering with our pensions.

I voted no to tabling, but Goodman stoked enough fear to stop the resolution. Trustees are elected to work for city, not state pensions. I didn’t think of that at the time, but I knew that even if it were statewide, parts of the constitution are changed via voting, like our Equal Rights Amendment.

At the DA, Mulgrew did not finally entertain the co-pay by chance. He’d prepped for it. Mulgrew called the proposal to end co-pays out of order, claiming that any such request needed to go first before the health committee—the committee that rubber-stamped a new health plan without reading it.

Despite Mulgrew’s creative assertion, doubtless dreamt up by one of his loyalty-oath signers, there is absolutely nothing in the resolution that formed the committee stating that the DA may not make changes without the committee’s approval. It says word for word:

…the UFT will convene a permanent, UFT Healthcare Task Force, with retired and in-service members of multiple caucuses to review all significant changes to healthcare and make recommendations to the Delegate Assembly.

Co-pays, as far as I can tell, are not health care. They are fees. Regardless, nowhere does the resolution say the DA may not make its own determinations. In fact, it asserts:

…the UFT Delegate Assembly is the highest decision-making body of the UFT…

The DA is the highest decision-making body of the UFT, unless Mulgrew doesn’t feel like following their decisions.

For example, the DA has twice affirmed support for the New York Health Act, but because Mulgrew opposes it, the whole union does. And what Mulgrew wants, he gets. In fact, the DA voted last week to endorse Mulgrew’s edict that any change must go through the health committee.

It’s pretty clear the DA will not act as check or balance, and is willing to go along with Whatever Mulgrew Says. Like the health committee, the DA voted for a health plan it was not allowed to see. Unfortunately, this is a direct result of the flawed resolution the RTC brought to the Delegate Assembly.

The health care resolution idea originated from a petition that James Eterno and Daniel Alicea initiated—to bring all health care changes to membership. I’m not sure how it was modified to bring it to the DA instead, but I know I wasn’t consulted. Whoever was consulted told Unity about it. LeRoy Barr was there, ready to not only pay lip service to opposing Medicare Advantage, but also to establish this health committee.

The committee is a rubber stamp, designed to provide Mulgrew cover. He can now claim they made the decision rather than him. Never mind that he or his cronies hand-picked them. If this committee can recommend a health contract they haven’t seen, taking Unity at their word, they can and will buy anything.

Our RTC, over the last two years, has enabled Unity to make better excuses than they’d otherwise have had. These things can and should be anticipated. We must do better, and that’s why we’ve started Fix Retiree Benefits.

We believe in putting members first. Take our survey right now, please.

And register to join us at our first Town Hall meeting Sunday, June 28th.