Archive Page 25

Will there be a contract this year? UFT’s latest communication suggests not.

Published June 9, 2023 Contract , Healthcare 15 Comments

On Monday, the 500-member negotiating committee will meet. That highly anticipated event, the culmination of a year of negotiations, will be followed immediately by the final UFT executive board meeting of the 2022-2023 school year. The very next afternoon, the June Delegate Assembly will be held. Big meetings like this are rarely so close together. You’d think the contract was ready for a vote.

But, as the DA invite email shows below, there may not be a contract vote this year after all. This comes as a bit of a surprise. Other unions like DC37 and PBA finished bargaining in February and April, respectively. And UFT leadership was signaling just weeks ago that the City and the DOE wanted the contract done quickly as much as they did. Then, almost immediately, they started to shift that tune.

It’s clear to me that UFT leadership wanted a contract before summer. They wanted to deliver that sub-inflation ‘pattern’ into our hands in time for our much-needed vacations. And in all likelihood, they wanted to encourage a yes vote by leveraging summer vacation against voting UFT members. But, as months went by, it appeared that they had misjudged the City and the DOE. Having signaled all over the place that they would only use ‘soft’ organizing tactics, UFT leadership showed that they had no leverage in negotiations. That summer contract they wanted was going to be harder to close than they thought. .

Then, the City started to play hardball. We were ambushed with a calendar that arbitrarily expanded our work calendar well beyond 180 days. That was big news for teachers, who erupted in outrage all over social media. But the real slight, at least according to early UFT communications, was the DOE’s unconfirmed adoption of the pilot workday. In retaliation, UFT leadership entered us into a nonsensical game of chicken that will now likely stick us with 37.5 minutes of tutoring after school each day, and no Other Professional Work (OPW) or Parent Engagement (PE) time. In other words, after a campaign that emphasized teacher-directed time, the result of contractual negotiations for this September may be that control of our time is gutted more than ever before. A terrible result – and a blow that will be compounded by a Unity-imposed ’10 % health insurance pay-cut’ whose deadline is closing in fast.

There is still time, of course. Maybe UFT leadership will get a last-minute agreement finalized this weekend. But under these circumstances, how good could it be? With such harsh wording in the DA email, isn’t it implicit that there’s no way we’re close to a good deal – one which would come close to meeting UFC’s 5 core demands? I sincerely doubt it.

Mulgrew: the Comptroller is worried about MAP. Why aren’t you?

Published June 8, 2023 Healthcare 7 Comments
Tags: ,

Today, Comptroller Brad Lander declined to register the Aetna MAP plan for New York City municipal retirees, citing not just pending litigation, but also concerns over the ethics of reverting to Medicare Advantage in the first place. Specifically, he noted “the broader Medicare Advantage trends are worrisome. Recent investigations identified extensive allegations of fraud, abuse, overbilling, and denials of medically necessary care at 9 of the top 10 Medicare Advantage plans, including CVS Health, which owns Aetna.” These arguments are familiar to New Action members and others in the opposition – we’ve been making them for over a year now. Nevertheless, despite some support from legislative politicians, especially over 12-126, this may be the first major instance of a top executive player putting a halt to MAP.

Is this a sign of a turning tide, inspiring hope for members of later pension tiers who fear retiring long after future iterations of watered down MAP contracts gut our health plans? I’d like to hope so.

Yes, Mayor Adams may reverse Lander’s decision. But we now have well positioned allies refusing to sign off on retiree healthcare cuts. And that bodes well for the future, even if it does mean our dear beloved Unity-led UFT leaders may need to find their ‘healthcare savings’ elsewhere, as their debt to the City passes its due date. And yes, with the spotlight on retirees, we should expect those cuts to land on in-service teachers, who have been promised the absurd: an ‘equal or better replacement to GHI at 10% cheaper of a cost.’

When will that replacement be announced? You better bet it won’t be until after Mulgrew tries to ram through a mediocre contract—and that process will start as early as next week. So, before we vote on a TA, let’s make sure we ask – what will only 90% of our current health plan look like, and how will we afford it on a pay-cut?

Make no mistake: we can’t win the battle against healthcare cuts solely on the good graces of well-positioned politicians. Ultimately, we need to situate ourselves to be able to stop anti-labor backroom deals. As Mulgrew is keen to remind us at DAs and executive board meetings, health care is a part of our overall compensation. Well, we vote on whether to accept what the City offers us in economic compensation. So, both now and when we’re retired, we deserve a vote on changes to medical coverage too. Since UFT leadership doesn’t see the problems everyone else sees with reducing our coverage and tossing retirees onto MAP, we need a formal and permanent mechanism to keep them from doing so.

UFT: Why weren’t we remote today?

Published June 7, 2023 UFT 4 Comments

Today, I’m writing with a bit of a headache, having breathed in exorbitant amounts of smoke and toxins both at work and on my commute. Due to an injury that makes standing/walking risky, I don’t have much of a choice but to bike twenty miles round trip. Teachers, after all, can’t afford to live anywhere near District 2. For the most part, breathing felt fine at work until the end of the day, when the infected outside air made its way into the building, bringing all learning to a halt. My school has decent ventilation due to solid chapter organizing during early Covid. At other schools without the right equipment, I understand the air was bad all day.

There are rumors that tomorrow we might get a remote day – as we should. Tomorrow is Chancellor’s Day, so the City can’t use ‘the kids just need to be in school, period’ as an excuse, like they do during floods, blizzards, and—now—catastrophic air quality events. In fact, seeing as the City wants to reduce their spending on our healthcare, I have no idea why they’d bring us in. Do they really want to see a surge of visits to urgent cares, pulmonologists, and oncologists because of a day when we could all be on Zoom anyways?

Probably not. On the other hand – it’s interesting that Chancellor’s Day was even originally set up as a fully in-person day. There was a time, not long ago, when UFT leadership would proclaim loudly ‘there’s no need for us to be in the building when the students aren’t there.’ But when it was announced that the DOE expected us all to work in person on Chancellor’s Day, there was little fanfare. There tends to be very little said by our leadership when the UFT loses. But, DC-37 recently won up to two remote days a week for certain titles, so it’s strange that even without a catastrophic weather event principals didn’t even have the option to make all-day meetings remote tomorrow.

One last point. Whether we get tomorrow to be work-from-home or not, school should have been remote today, at a minimum. That’s the whole reason we set up Google Classroom at the beginning of the year – to prepare for possibilities like today. The fact that we didn’t move to remote also shows that the DOE has no reason to have so many extra days in the next calendar. If we aren’t even going to go remote when it’s in the best interest of staff and students, there’s even less of a chance that we’re going to cancel school entirely.

We need to push on this. Sacred days have been stolen from us to arbitrarily extend the school year for 2023-2024. The fact that school wasn’t cancelled today proves that the City has no intention of using any one of those days for an emergency closing. With the likelihood at exactly 0% that we ever cancel a single day of school, there’s no reason not to have Passover and various other holidays on the calendar next year.

Learn more about

our UFT Caucus

Content Policy

Content of signed articles and comments represents the opinions of their authors. The views expressed in signed articles are not necessarily the views of New Action/UFT.
Follow New Action – UFT on WordPress.com
September 2026
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  

Blog Stats

  • 414,795 hits