Fighting for educators, building chapters, increasing democracy, with a progressive agenda
On Tuesday, 4/11/23, at 12:00 PM, a rally is scheduled at City Hall in support of keeping traditional public Medicare. Retired and in-service members alike are urged to attend. Numbers matter. Show the City we aren’t going to just roll over and let them privatize our healthcare.
Writing can only be one small piece of unionism. Directly after publishing my piece yesterday analyzing the grade-ins (which was blatantly and maliciously misrepresented by Unity), I organized. Like many others in New Action and across the union’s progressive opposition, I did my part and shot over to a contract event near my school, where I participated in a morning protest asking the City to do right by our educators. Dozens of teachers and other UFT members from several schools on the Lower East Side / Chinatown came together to ask for better pay and working conditions. Members of the community cheered us on and joined in. Here I am, along with fellow H.S. Executive Board member, Alex Jallot (MORE) – one of the successful event’s primary organizers. (Hopefully UFT leadership doesn’t sue over the sign).
After the event, I walked the ten minutes to my school and worked a full day, teaching the kids of our city in exchange for normal teacher wages. I’m not paid a UFT central salary to organize full-time. But, I do organize. Plenty of teachers in the opposition do, but not necessarily in the ways that Unity wants us to. During my duty-free breaks, I spread the healthcare petition around my chapter. Despite reports that Unity Caucus members are using their titles/positions as paid UFT staffers to try and dissuade our membership from signing the petition, teachers in my school are signing it in droves, seeking to stop the City (and our complicit Unity-elected leaders) from making major changes to our healthcare without democratic member input. Petitions, by the way, are a great way to have 1:1 conversations about union issues with members of your chapter – members who you may not have a chance to regularly speak with throughout a busy school week. So don’t just sign today, take it to your chapters and get other members to sign as well.
Today, the Municipal Labor Commission (MLC) voted to force hundreds of thousands of retirees off of traditional public Medicare and onto one of two privatized Medicare Advantage Plans (MAPs). (Full analysis of those two plans and the UFT’s role: here). Most of the City unions did not vote in favor of this change. But most unions are much smaller than the UFT and DC37. Therefore, with weighted voting, Mulgrew and Garrido were able to ram through Mulgrewcare with the help of a handful of other union leaders.
Weighted voting in itself isn’t unfair. Some of the unions in the MLC are smaller than divisions in the UFT. It makes sense that our union would get more of a say than particularly tiny ones. On the other hand, does it make sense that UFT votes as one giant bloc? Perhaps, the issue is that UFT has a winner-take-all model of democracy. Only a few minor seats, such as the High School Executive Board, are obtained through division votes. So, even though more than 40% of in-service teachers voted against Mulgrew, including the majority of high school voters, Mulgrew gets to speak for us – and use our weight to influence MLC votes. That’s particularly egregious, because those who voted against Mulgrew voted overwhelmingly for United for Change (which included New Action). One of our platform items was to preserve traditional Medicare and end healthcare givebacks. It’s sickening to know that Mulgrew was able to use our numbers to vote against our interests as explicitly outlined in our election materials.
Better yet, why wasn’t a decision this big opened up to a vote for general membership? Even those who voted for Mulgrew in the last election didn’t know that he would push through MAP without even a payup option to keep traditional Medicare. We should have been able to directly vote on this question. But, when asked, Mulgrew made it clear to the executive board, the DA, and–most explicitly–to the retirees that membership would not get a say. His message was simple, a paraphrased version of Trump’s infamous: ‘elections have consequences.’ By winning the UFT election, it seems, Mulgrew earned the right to throw us off our healthcare. He earned the right, in fact, to throw every municipal union off their healthcare.
Look, the damage isn’t necessarily done. Tier sixers, like myself, are probably feeling pretty pessimistic right now. (We might be able to win for a while, but how do we win for another 50 years?) Nevertheless, we can organize. We can fight back. And we need to take Mulgrew at his word. If elections have consequences this drastic, it’s time for members to start getting involved with alternatives.
We can’t keep letting Mulgrew’s ‘political party,’ Unity Caucus, do this to us. We can’t keep letting them do this to our brothers and sisters throughout the labor movement either. It’s time for a change.
New Action - UFT 