UFT Unity Is Expert at Doing Nothing

Their leader pays valuable lip service to health care, but changes nothing whatsoever.

It’s been a good six weeks since UFT Unity’s leader, Michael Mulgrew, got up on his hind legs and declared he no longer supported Medicare Advantage for retired members. He sent us an email boasting of this heroic stance. Not only that, but he also sent rank and file members an email telling them he no longer supports their being dumped into a health care plan, a plan he negotiated, that would cost Eric Adams 10% less.

On the surface, these appeared to be good things. Retired members were outraged at losing real Medicare and having to depend on the good graces of Aetna. In fact, we were so outraged that we voted out UFT Unity by a 2-1 margin. Make no mistake, Unity was aware of our discontent. I personally discussed it with at least one UFT officer.

Unity’s response was to do absolutely nothing, boast of the civility of Tom Murphy, and hope for the best. This in itself showed abysmal judgment. After 60 years of near-total control of our union, they deemed themselves invincible. As early as two years ago, I noticed retirees who’d never been active in union saying that Unity’s actions were unacceptable.

Michael Mulgrew, surrounded by paid Unity loyalists, did not get the memo. He dismissed health concerns as “fairy tales” and said we “make everything a conspiracy.” He went on insulting us over and over. Clearly he did not perceive just how upset we were. Unity assumed they could do whatever they wanted to retirees, and that (in between playing shuffleboard and dominoes) we would vote them back in no matter what.

UFT Unity is hopelessly out of touch. They only deal with people on UFT payroll, and everyone on payroll has obvious incentive to say what leadership wants to hear. Mulgrew got his impressions of the Retired Teacher Chapter from former CL Tom Murphy, who spent the entire year I’ve been retired trying to suppress our voices.

How do you rationalize having an entire year of meetings with no motions periods? How do you rationalize having an entire year of meeting with not a single vote? I’ve been retired for only a year, and I’m very curious just how many years Murphy got away with this. (If anyone knows, please enlighten me in the comments.)

This is hubris, pure and simple. Murphy zealously controlled the question periods, if he didn’t simply cancel them. One month, he absolutely refused to let our new chapter leader, Bennett Fischer, speak at all. The following month, after magnanimously calling on Bennett, he eagerly called on Unity’s Barbara Waldman, who stated the MA program did not have prior authorizations. That was patently false.

What were they trying to achieve? It appears they felt if they could just suppress us and keep us quiet, we’d simply go away. They grossly underestimated our resolve.

And here’s the thing—they continue to do just that. Mulgrew evidently thought that, by making a simple statement, we’d all turn around and support him. He seemed to believe we’d forget that is was he who sold us out in the first place. He followed up his statements with no action whatsoever. He didn’t file amicus briefs in our court cases. He didn’t lobby to get pending legislation to protect us written into law.

In fact, the only thing he’s done is sit mute as co-pays were imposed on us beginning next year. Mike Mulgrew surrounds himself with paid sycophants who tell him how wonderful he is. For that, they get UFT jobs and second pensions, paid for with our dues. What he hasn’t got is the remotest notion of what it’s like to be a retiree.

The fact is, once you retire, you’ve got a fixed income. That’s pretty much it. Your compensation doesn’t go up when the union gets a new contract. In fact, the only thing you can depend on these days is UFT Unity sticking their well-compensated hands into your pocket for co-pays, higher co-pays, or whatever else they can come up with.

There are a whole lot of city retirees who are just getting by. They can’t afford an upcharge for the care we were promised all our careers for free. They can’t afford the copays Mulgrew and his BFFs in the Municipal Labor Committee failed to block. They won’t be getting the raises Unity negotiated for rank and file.

It is absolutely outrageous that Unity saw fit to fund a raise by selling out our health care. It is even more outrageous that they thought they could do so at the expense of retirees who do not get the raise. We, evidently, are just a bunch of doddering old fools, hobbling around on crutches, and we’d happily vote for them again even if they decimated our health care.

Make no mistake, that’s what they assumed. They take us for fools. And they still do. Otherwise, Mulgrew would take meaningful action to protect us. And now they’re coming for rank and file. Mulgrew now says he opposes this plan because the city wants a premium. But he agreed to the premium.

Will he be able to fool rank and file any better than he fooled us? It’s on us to make sure he doesn’t. I was reluctant to retire, and put it off for two years because I feared it would make my writing less relevant. Well there’s where I was dead wrong.

We are the leaders of our union. We and the paraprofessionals have our fingers on the wheels of change. And it’s on us to let rank and file know that we can no longer afford Michael Mulgrew and his Unity patronage cult. What’s more important—their patronage gigs or our health? That’s a no-brainer.

We can and will have representative democracy in our United Federation of Teachers.