New Action – UFT

This afternoon, UFT leadership decided that the OT/PT bargaining unit would be split up between those who voted no (OT/PTs) and those who voted yes (nurses, supervisors of OT/PTs, nurse supervisors, and audiologists). The subunits who already voted ‘yes’ will not get a revote. They will automatically get their contracts ratified, despite the initial bargaining unit voting ‘no.’ This includes nurses, who, incidentally, might have voted otherwise (‘no’) had they known that municipal hospital nurses would break the pattern and get pay parity with nurses in the private sector. School nurses, who will follow the UFT’s much touted ‘pattern,’ indeed, will now be amongst the lowest paid nurses in New York City. They will not get a revote. But, yes votes were never the issue to Unity. No votes were.

And indeed, with ‘no votes’ the issue, only those titles who voted ‘no,’ i.e. OT/PTs, will be given the ‘opportunity’ to do a revote. Despite voting 2/3s ‘no’ the first time around, they will be made to vote again- with the hope that they will vote yes this time around. The entire process will take place by mail, and will be completed in the month of August, when many members will be on vacation. Notably, the decision comes just after the OT/PT Executive Board voted overwhelmingly to not do a revote, but after hundreds of OT/PT members, mostly (but not entirely) members who had already voted yes or failed to vote the first time around, petitioned to overturn non-ratification by holding a revote

There’s a lot to unpack here, and while I won’t comment on the ‘reverse gerrymandering’ of the bargaining unit, there are many reasons that the ‘revote’ decision is problematic. After all, nothing about the contract has changed. It is just as bad as it was before. All that has changed, in fact, is that Mulgrew has conveyed that he won’t be able to do the job of renegotiating, especially in a timely manner. This is not a reason to revote on a contract – it’s a reason to get UFT leadership to do their job (or find someone else to take their place). 

Instead, UFT leadership decided to work with others in their caucus to divide the chapter, for political gain. After decimating the ‘unity’ of the chapter; after telling them that they were only going to get the City’s first deal, nothing better; after telling them that organizing was pointless; after aiding and publicizing a ‘revote’ campaign, which was deliberately politicized to scapegoat non-Unity OT/PT leadership for daring to think that organizing was worthwhile; after all this, Unity-aligned UFT leadership set up a situation where this time, they are much more likely to get that yes vote.

But mark my words – those new ‘yeses,’ if they come out that way, won’t be affirmations of the contract – they’ll be votes of no confidence in the ability of Mulgrew to do his job. 

Not only is this situation an insult to OT/PTs, who deserved better but were stomped down and told they wouldn’t get it no matter how hard they tried; this is an insult to unionism in general. It is clear now that UFT leadership was never in the business, this contract season, of more than uncritically communicating messages from the City/DOE and doing whatever they could to get membership to agree with taking less. This situation is case and point. Now we know that if we ever vote that the City hasn’t done enough – that we deserve better, like nurses in public hospitals deserved better – now we know what the Unity-led leadership will do: whatever it takes to dismantle democracy and avoid ‘doing the work.’

The full email from UFT leadership follows: 

“Thank you to those who attended our meeting last week concerning a revote of your chapter’s contract. After looking into the details of how to break up the bargaining unit, we can now announce that we will move forward with the split within the next week. 

In the past several weeks there has been an outpouring of opinion from your chapter concerning the idea of a revote. We weighed all sides of the arguments and took everything into consideration including the fact that the Supervisors of Nurses and Therapists, Audiologists and School Nurses are officially being removed from your contract. The OT/PT chapter will now stand alone and, as a result, the situation has changed significantly. We now feel strongly about having a revote only for your chapter. The other three groups already ratified in the original vote in June so there is no reason for them to revote. Please note that the result of your chapter’s revote – no matter the outcome – will be final.

We met with the American Arbitration Association to discuss the voting process and determined that the ballots will be mailed on Tuesday, Aug. 8, and will be due Aug. 29. They will be counted on Aug. 30. Additional voting instructions will be mailed with your ballot.

We recognize that some members may be away for the summer vacation. If this applies to you, you can provide us with a summer address that is different from your home address by contacting our election coordinator, Yasmin Colon (ycolon@uft.org), and we will have the ballot sent to that address. 

We will also have a dedicated hotline for anyone who needs help with the revoting process. Please call 212-331-6310 if you need assistance at any point. 

Again, thank you for speaking out to make your voices heard.

Sincerely,

Michael Mulgrew”

This week, we learned that a municipal union finally beat the DC37 pattern – indeed, they beat it by a substantial margin – roughly double. Nurses working in NYC’s municipal hospitals have negotiated a contract that, with 37% pay increases over 5.5 years, puts the UFT’s unpensionable bonus driven ‘17.58 to 20.42%’ increase to shame. And while the particularities of their situation must of course temper our analysis, there are substantial lessons to be gleaned for UFT members. 

Lesson 1: The Pattern is not Just the Pattern.

Municipal nurses, who technically work for Health + Hospitals, a public-private partnership, still essentially work for the City – the same as teachers, police officers, and the multitude of titles falling under DC37. Like those other titles, municipal nurses generally follow the pattern, and when they’ve broken it, they’ve only done so by a fraction of a percent – much the same as other municipal unions. We, who had our pay expectations shredded to bits by Mulgrew and Cambria’s repeated assertions that the ‘pattern is the pattern,’ may be surprised to see that, this time around, our colleagues in scrubs have so markedly exceeded the subinflation increases to which we are doomed. We’ll get more into the why and how of nurses beating the pattern below, as the leverage they had was much different than that of teachers, but the key for now is that a union can double the pattern when circumstances are ripe to give workers a negotiating advantage. 

Lesson 2: ‘Parity’ is a thing.

Those of us who have been following the situation with OT/PTs, know that they largely voted down their contract because of their own fight to win pay parity with titles such as teachers, speech therapists, and social workers. Mulgrew has suggested that the City is dismissive of the OT/PT parity argument. Yet, the City accepted it from nurses, signaling that parity is indeed a strategy that can work. To be sure, nurses are getting increases to get them closer to parity with NY-based nurses in the private sector. OT/PTs’ claims to parity have been thwarted, reportedly, because private-sector therapists do not make more money than school-based therapists. That’s one reason OT/PTs for a Fair Contract have correctly situated school-based therapists as having a distinctly pedagogical type of work, which should grant them pedagogical pay. The win by nurses suggests that a parity strategy is worth pursuing for OT/PTs in their second round of negotiations – if Mulgrew can get around to doing the work.

Lesson 3: We can benefit from the work of other unions who aren’t encumbered by the Taylor Law.  

Nurses in the private sector have seen large-scale pay increases over the last several years. This has to do with many things, such as (1) the gargantuan profits of the healthcare industry; (2) a massive shortage of nurses, which has driven up salaries as hospitals try to attract workers to apply; and (3) the strike power. Unlike teachers, who have no private sector counterparts to strike without being bound by the ‘Taylor Law,’ nurses in New York have used the strike power much to their advantage. So, while public sector nurses might not be able to strike without the risk of severe penalties, they can apply to seek parity with private sector nurses, who largely used the power of the strike to clear their way into higher tax brackets.

Of course, not all titles have this advantage. OT/PTs, as discussed above, already make about the industry standard. Unless private sector therapists began having massive labor wins, they wouldn’t help the UFT parity argument. Teachers also don’t have private sector counterparts – at least none who would help us with parity. Teachers at private schools and charter schools tend, in fact, to be nonunionized, and to make considerably less on average than teachers in public schools. Attempts to compare us with teachers of suburban districts on long island, who tend to make more than us in the DOE, have also fallen flat. Instead, arbitrators have tended to compare us with teachers in other big cities, which hasn’t done us much good. Perhaps, however, as teachers in cities like LA and Oakland see their salaries skyrocket due to strike  tactics, we’ll be able to use parity arguments’ to make up for our Taylor-bound inadequacy.

Lesson 4: Shortages Matter to the City – at least when it costs them.

We should not assume that the City gave parity to nurses simply because it was ‘the right thing to do.’ (Indeed, an arbitrator actually had to force the City to do so, but I digress, and explore that more in lesson 5). Rather, they were in a substantial and expensive bind, because of the major staffing issues that befall municipal hospitals. Municipal nurses are highly transient, because they can easily transfer to private hospitals where, up-until-now, they were paid much better. Not only has this led to serious staffing issues in municipal hospitals, but it’s been expensive to the City. Indeed, because parity pay increases are expected to help halt nurse turnover, they’re also expected to keep the City from having to assuage staffing issues with expensive ‘temp’ contracts. Indeed, pay parity might actually save the City money. 

With school enrollment falling around the City and many licenses having to even grapple with hiring freezes, teachers are not in the same situation as nurses in this regard. Class size legislation should theoretically change this, though even if that legislation is taken seriously, the lack of an equivalently expensive ‘teacher temp position’ makes it impossible to make a complete analogy with nurses. (Indeed, ‘substitute teachers’ are far less expensive to the City than ‘substitute nurses.’) Nevertheless, as teacher shortages increasingly and unfortunately affect the US, we may see our leverage start to change in negotiations – at least if we have the foresight to include parity language into deals.

Lesson 5: It Pays to Not Take the First Deal.

Nurses had to fight for this deal, invoking a decades-old clause that the employer reportedly did not want to fully honor, which commits the City to paying nurses parity. Indeed, according to their union, “the five-and-a-half-year contract comes after a month of expedited mediation and then impasse arbitration.” This was not a situation like that of the UFT, in which we seemed to take a rushed and imperfect deal to simply ‘get negotiations over with.’ Nurses in general have been far less complacent with the City. While Mulgrew led the charge to force retirees onto inferior Medicare Advantage, for instance, nurses voted ‘no.’ And indeed, it appears that the nurses union, by fighting the City rather than taking the first deal they saw, have gotten their workers a much better deal. There’s a lesson there. But, Mulgrew, who is currently trying to avoid renegotiating the OT/PT contract by orchestrating a re-vote on their original first deal, is unlikely to learn from it. 

Ratification votes have consequences. Yet, in the UFT, those consequences aren’t what serious unionists might expect. 

In most unions–unions with functioning democracies–a decisive 2:1 no-vote by membership would send a clear mandate for union leaders to go back to the bargaining table. That used to be how we did it too – and renegotiating quickly and in good faith led to affected bargaining units getting better deals, every time. But renegotiation is not how Unity-elected leadership is doing it this time. As Claudia Irizzary Aponte aptly titled her must- read article for the City, this morning, “School Therapists Want a Better Contract Deal. The UFT Wants Them to Give Up.” 

It’s no surprise, really, that Mulgrew and co. would rather the contract process be over already. It’s no surprise that they’d rather not have to ‘do the work’ of achieving a palatable deal for a grossly underpaid and underappreciated bargaining unit. What’s a surprise, though, even for me, is how Unity has chosen not only to not renegotiate, but to weaponize the moment for political gain. Indeed, recent actions show that the caucus of UFT leadership is willing to tear a chapter apart and undermine their ability to negotiate a better deal, if it means they might be able to regain Unity control.

‘Doing the work’ of tearing a chapter apart

In my op-ed for the Indypendent earlier this month, I closed by asking some questions of the OT/PT no-vote: “

1. Is it possible that Mulgrew and his affiliates would use this moment as a political opportunity to sow dissent against non-Unity representation rather than work to achieve contract goals? 
2. Is it possible that the Unity-controlled UFT might intentionally disrupt the second negotiations to achieve a result that could serve as a cautionary tale against other members voting “No” in the future?”

At that point, it was still early. The answers to these questions were not yet clear. But now, at the end of July, we know that Unity has, deplorably, done both of these things. 

• Unity members, many of whom voted yes on the deal to begin with, pushed a revote campaign. By design, what was often explicit in this campaign, was the absurd and clearly political suggestion that OT/PTs had only voted down their original deal because they were ‘misled’ into doing so. A revote made sense now, specifically, because now they had all the facts. In addition, the ‘trouble makers’ who were ‘responsible’ for thousands voting no, should potentially be recalled. These campaigns, while perhaps not originally endorsed by UFT leadership, were given life by various official UFT communications suggesting that (a) OT/PTs were wrong to vote no; (b) they weren’t going to get a better deal anyways – it was simply a ‘fact’ that the city would not give into any demands. Moreover, once the revote idea was out there, Mulgrew and others publicly humored it. In a particularly egregious act of cowardice, they put OT/PT leadership in the impossible position of deciding whether or not to do a revote (politically, a lose-lose decision). When OT/PT leadership decided to respect the AAA-confirmed ‘no vote’ of their chapter, UFT leadership publicly threw them under the bus for doing so – in front of nearly 1,000 members.
• On social media, scores of high-level Unity members, including generously paid full-time UFT staffers, began adding fuel to the fire. With tens of thousands of UFT members looking on, they furthered inter- and intra-chapter division by ‘liking’ and commenting approvingly on highly public posts deriding OT/PT leadership and pushing for a politicized revote. Many of these posts don’t just push reprehensibly undemocratic arguments, but border on libelous in their mischaracterization of non-Unity union activists. Outright lies and character assassinations have not stopped Unity members from actively disseminating and conferring legitimacy onto divisive, dis-unifying, text.
• Unity Caucus officially published a hit-piece putting the blame for Mulgrew’s failure to negotiate a fair contract, somehow, onto current OT/PT leadership (OT/PTs for a Fair Contract and Melissa Williams). It’s a piece rife with conspiracy theories about (never named) political motives, humoring the false and divisive notion that Williams was somehow responsible for ‘misleading’ members into an overwhelming no vote (without specifying how this would even be possible). It also implies, falsely, that Williams and OT/PTs for a Fair Contract have the seemingly singular power to renegotiate the deal now, and are simply failing to do so. In fact, Mulgrew, who wrote disagreeable language into the TA without checking with therapists first, should take all the blame for why therapists, of their own free will, voted no on a lousy deal. He should also take the blame for not being able to get the City back to the table. It is he, and not them, who controls the negotiating calendar.

Unity, by channeling OT/PT organizing energy into divisive ‘no vote’ and ‘recall’ petitions (for the wrong person), rather than funneling it into getting the City back to the table, has derailed the chapter’s potential to successfully renegotiate. UFT leadership should be helping organize the chapter to get a better deal. Instead, by their actions, and by the actions of their ‘political party,’ they are doing everything they can to undermine grassroots efforts to get contractual improvements. Apparently, getting back a handful of executive board seats in this year’s chapter elections, and creating an artificial cautionary tale for the rest of UFT membership of why ‘you never vote no,’ is more important to Unity than a fair contract for UFT members.