Replace and Reform the Municipal Labor Committee

We need an organization that improves salaries and working conditions, instead of trashing health care.

I wish you all a joyous Thanksgiving day and weekend. There’s much I’m thankful for. I’m thankful for my family and the great career I lucked into. I’m thankful for a group of friends with a vision for a better UFT. This year, I’m particularly thankful for dogs. We sometimes call things that go wrong dogs:

I wouldn’t take you to no dog joint.

I disagree with that—I trust and love my dogs.

I neither trust nor love the Municipal Labor Committee, and they’ve done nothing over the last decade to earn our gratitude. This group of union bosses does no favors for those of us who work for a living. They are directly responsible for gifting the city one billion of our 1.8 billion health stabilization fund back in 2014. They do great work for our contractual adversaries. For us? Not so much.

The sad truth is the MLC is dominated by UFT and DC37. We have not our stars, but ourselves to blame. And that must change.

In 2018, MLC outdid themselves, promising 600 million in annual health savings for all eternity, for the city (as opposed to us, who they ostensibly represent) in exchange for a three year contract that hovered around cost of living. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Mulgrew’s Very Smart People from the Unity Caucus not only supported, but also initiated these awful agreements.

As an umbrella group of city unions, the MLC should be working to improve the lot of working people. Instead, their most notable moves are those mentioned above. How did this happen? It starts with a jaded, cynical Unity Caucus that’s devolved into the assumption it can just do whatever, without consulting membership. But there’s more.

Back in 2013, I enthusiastically supported Bill de Blasio for NYC Mayor. I know, I was wrong. In fairness, UFT first endorsed some guy who said the city couldn’t afford to give teachers the raises NYPD and FDNY received.

I thought de Blasio was the guy who would turn around the damage Michael Bloomberg had done. I thought he’d finally stand up and turn around the pro-charter, anti-teacher, anti-public school stances Bloomberg and his Grinch of a chancellor had foisted upon us. (He may, of course, have simply been disappointed with UFT for first endorsing the no teacher raises guy.)

De Blasio began well. He resisted the charter lobby, denying new charters the free space Bloomberg had been granting them. Almost immediately thereafter, Albany passed a law that the city must either provide them the space they want, or pay rent for them. UFT bosses raised not a peep, and a highly placed source from NYSUT told me Michael Mulgrew explicitly approved of this law. As of 2019, this rent cost the city 100 million a year. Now? With rent going nowhere but up? Your guess is as good as mine.

After that law passed, de Blasio focused on pre-K, and abandoned his plans to curtail charters. He left all of Bloomberg’s people in place at the DOE. That’s why virtually every Step Two UFT grievance is still denied regardless of merit. That’s why the negotiators who wanted to push Joel Klein’s “thin contract,” which would have eliminated tenure, pay steps, and seniority stayed in place.

We managed to push back on the draconian proposed contract. We didn’t do so well on the equally draconian demands to cut our health care. (Of course, the openly ageist Unity Caucus may have figured retirees would simply never notice.)

Perhaps de Blasio had hoped for union support, and when he didn’t get it, went to the awful deals we got under him. More likely he just let his negotiators work them out. Regardless, our first contract with him was an abomination. Some unions resisted, but the MLC, with the support of UFT and DC37, approved the veritable dismantlement of our Health Stabilization fund, surrendering more than half of it back to the city, along with another 150 million for good measure.

The notion of unions financing our own raises is unacceptable.

And it’s an awful, awful precedent, as we learned from the 2018 givebackpalooza that screwed retirees and cut in-service health care by 10%.

It’s ironic, because when I opposed the last contract for failing to keep up with inflation, Unity voices criticized me. Did I think we could do better than the pattern? In fact, I did not. But back in 2014, there was an old pattern of 4% and 4%, a pattern that went to some big unions but not ours.

Given that Unity tells me pattern bargaining is akin to the Ten Commandments, you’d think UFT could demand it, and that would be that. Instead, we sorely diminished our health fund, and imposed the following crap pattern on our brother and sister city employees:

1 percent — 1 percent —$1,000 cash — 1 percent — 1.5 percent —2.5 percent — 3 percent

What was not said in the UFT communique referenced here was that the thousand dollar bonus was in lieu of a raise. The city’s thousand buck bonus bought a zero percent raise for a full eighteen months. 

Not only that, but UFT made us wait years for the twin four percent raises we’d already waited years for. As if that weren’t enough, these raises were denied to members who resigned or were fired, even though they earned them.

Despite the fact that Unity members lecture us over the sacred pattern, Michael Mulgrew got up on his hind legs and declared back pay was not a “God-given right.” According to UFT Unity, when the pattern is crap, we have to accept it. If it doesn’t meet cost of living, hard cheese. However, when the pattern appears attractive, we have to give away our health care funding, screw a portion of our former membership, impose a crap pattern on the rest of the city, and wait years and years to get it, with no interest at all.

Imagine if the Municipal Labor Committee turned its focus on improving salary and working conditions.

Imagine them focusing on improving our health coverage. Isn’t that what it ought to be there for? Imagine, for example, that the MLC were to agree, in advance, on a minimum acceptable pattern. And imagine that pattern were to, at the very least, meet or beat inflation?

Call me madcap, but I don’t think we should give up anything whatsoever to keep up with inflation. We shouldn’t have to wait eight years, with no interest, to get raises that were freely granted to other unions. It’s unconscionable Unity agreed to screw those who’ve left our profession out of money they worked for.

Should we throw our brothers and sisters under the bus simply because they can no longer vote?

Furthermore, if the city had broken the pattern, that could’ve been the death knell to pattern bargaining. Instead, we had them sort of give some of us the pattern, but years later, with neither interest nor adjustment for inflation. I bought a car in 2014, and no dealer on earth would have accepted the terms UFT negotiated for us.

UFT leadership has manipulated the Municipal Labor Committee to enable its terrible, shortsighted deals, deals that benefit the city more than the members. With our huge numbers, combined with those of DC37, Unity pushed this committee to do the expedient, as opposed to the beneficial.

While we were teaching, someone at 52 Broadway spent way too much time in that ergonomic desk chair.

A key problem is this—the deals Unity negotiates, and has managed to sell until last year, are awful on their face. New UFT leadership would reverse this pattern. Historically, DC37 and UFT have set patterns that did not meet inflation, and left the whole city working for less. How long have we sat on our hands and allowed this?

NYC mayors cry poverty, no matter what. They act like they’re shopping at the dollar store, and can spare only fifty cents right now. Our alleged leadership, our MLC, tells them, “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

We could change the MLC. We could decline stupid deals that sell out our health care for a pittance, and we could agree on minimum acceptable compensation increases.

UFT Unity agreed to the disastrous sellout of Medicare-eligible retirees, and further agreed to a health plan 10% cheaper for everyone else. They agreed to premiums as a possibility. Now Mulgrew says premiums are not acceptable. Unity learned the hard way, after losing concurrent elections in landslides, that they cannot sell this crap to membership.

We need an MLC that is responsive to members, not bosses. And next May, that will be within our reach.