Union Bosses Vs. Union Members

DC37 boss threatens City Council members if they move to preserve our health care.

You can’t make this stuff up. Harry Garrido, Executive Director of DC37, says if City Council members vote to retain real Medicare for retirees, he will withhold union support and donations from them. This is a big issue for a group facing imminent election campaigns.

The thing is, few to no union members actually want to be enrolled in a so-called “Advantage” plan. There’s no big upside to giving insurance giant Aetna a veto over your personal health care. They didn’t get to be an insurance giant by being all kind and understanding.

I’d love to say this is something new, but it’s been going on since 2014, when Juan Gonzalez broke the story that the geniuses in MLC had decided to hand the city a billion dollars from the fund that was dedicate to keep our health costs down. This was to be used “support wage increases and other economic items.” If that’s not an awful precedent, I don’t know what is. A few days later, they were going to save the city 3.4 billion.

What kind of idiotic premise is it to get cost of living raises at the expense of member health care?

That, evidently, has never occurred to the deep thinkers at MLC. They seem to have decided things worked out fine. They had restricted first-year employees to HIP, and allowed them to choose other plans in year two. (In fairness, that didn’t sound so severe to me, but friends suggested it was inequitable. In retrospect, they were absolutely right.)

Sometimes the notion of a slippery slope is a fallacy, but by 2018 MLC determined things had worked out so well they agreed to future cuts. This time, they were $600 million a year, forever. For this we got a three-year contract somewhere around cost of living. I supported that contract, and I deeply regret it. UFT failed to include details of that agreement when we ratified, and I only found out how awful it was years later.

Now all retirees are facing an “Advantage” plan, with copays and pre-approvals they never had before. Union leaders, like Garrido, Mulgrew, and every single member of the UFT Unity Caucus, think it’s a great idea. Meanwhile, they’re trying to find something 10% cheaper for those of us enrolled in GHI. If you think that will get us the same or better quality, I think you need to look up “cheaper” in a dictionary.

I’ve been a teacher since 1984. I never imagined leaders of multiple unions would fight to save money for the city, even as they did little or nothing to get money for us.

Yesterday, a UFT rep pushing the contract told our chapter the 3% raise was fantastic. Adams only offered us one and a quarter, and DC37 got DOUBLE! WHO DOES THAT? We’re lucky Adams didn’t offer us 1%. Then we’d hear 2% was fantastic. What if he’d offered us zero? HE OFFERED US ZERO AND WE GOT TRIPLE WHAT HE ASKED? WHAT MORE ARE YOU GONNA WANT?

I keep asking myself just what more our leaders are gonna give away. We have a wonderful contract, they say, except the raise is barely one-third of inflation. I’m very proud of this contract, they say, but our health care will be diminished. But, they say, we DON’T have the 37 minutes of THIS, and we have 55 minutes of THAT, so WHO NEEDS MONEY OR HEALTH CARE?

We need new leadership, leadership that serves us, and not Eric Adams. We need a new MLC, an MLC that will negotiate agreements that help union members, not Eric Adams. If MLC were not thoroughly incompetent, they’d have faced pattern bargaining by agreeing en masse not to accept one that is crap. (You know, like this one.)

We have to keep our eye on the prize, and that prize is upcoming elections, when we will replace Michael Mulgrew, Harry Garrido, and their entire teams of sycophants with real live union members who will faithfully represent other real live union members.

Here’s a free tip for UFT Unity—your best chance for survival is losing the court case against Marianne and her determined friends. If health care doesn’t go, you may not go either.