Exposing our union on privatization - RandiCare anyone? Plus Defending Our Healthcare - Bigly Raucus Retiree Rally outside UFT followed by March to DC 37

Let me start by saying last week's rally outside UFT HQ at the DA with well over 100 people was fabulous.  The outside game. I will report on the inside game at the DA separately. Below are videos, photos and other info from media on the rally. Not bad for old foggies on a freezing day - I wore 12 layers and was still chilled and ran to get the ferry home a bit early because for me a chill is an open door for getting sick.

Ok, I'm late with this and other reports. I plead LAZINESS and watching all kinds of crap on TV.

I have a number of events and their consequences to report and so much information has been coming in my problem is deciding what to include in these reports.

Tuesday, December 27, 2022 - Happy almost New Year

How does our union support corporate interests? Let me count the ways:

• Private health care industry - Medicare Advantage
• The educational industrial complex - testing companies, initially charter schools
• The military industrial complex though massive defense spending - our union is fine with the current defense budget while schools are starved.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] can expect to catch a lot more hell from municipal retirees refusing to be pushed into a for-profit, privatized, Medicare Advantage plan. Roughly one-hundred determined retirees, some of them 80-plus, rallied outside the UFT headquarters at 52 Broadway on Wednesday afternoon before marching onto the MLC offices at 55 Water Street.... Emergency Rally to Say NO to threats to Healthcare, Dec. 21, Unity machine shaky, Irony: Republican (Ariola) and Left Dems (Caban) on City Council Support Retirees, center/liberal Dems Waffle

“Fragmenting” traditional Medicare, Dr. Moore added, will only end up costing municipal retirees more money they can ill afford on limited incomes...... Work-Bites

Daniel Alicea over at Educators of NYC has done some research along with Illinois retired teacher unionist Fred Klonsky to show that privatizing Medicare to get the insurance companies richer is not just a local issue but NYC is up against a huge, national Medicare privatization push that the AFT endorses.-- ICE blog, CONNECTING THE DOTS ON WHY MULGREW IS NOT BACKING OFF ON UNPOPULAR, ILLEGAL MEDICARE ADVANTAGE FOR NYC RETIREES

Boy do we love it when dots are connected and James, Daniel and Fred Klonsky are helping make sense of what on the surface looks like a weird attempt by a public service union to undermine a major government health support network known as Medicare. 

• In 2020 both the NEA and the AFT voted to keep single payer out of the DNC platform.

There are deep ties to the Democratic Party corporate wing. The right wing is correct that there is corruption in the Dem Party -- they just don't point to the right type of corruption and our own beloved union at the local, state and national level. How can you be pro-corporate and pro-union? You can't.

The UFT/AFT/NYSUT leadership for decades has been married to the corporate center Democratic Party and its pro-corporate policies which often translate into anti-government. You might think it weird to bring such a charge at the supposed pro government and supposedly pro-labor Dem party. Is Joe Biden pro-labor?

• Most Pro-Union President' Runs Into Doubts in Labor Ranks

• If Biden Is Really Pro-Union, He Has One Chance to Prove It

....like his predecessors, Mr. Biden effectively seeks to manage the long-term decline of labor in a relatively humane way — by making favorable appointments and enacting measures that help at the margins — but has yet to take the sorts of risks that would restore power to workers. ..Mr. Biden has “gestured in interesting ways in certain moments,” said Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago. “But it doesn’t seem like he has the stomach to see the gestures through.”

By the way - have you seen any comment from our union on the railway issue? Sick days? What are sick days? Slaves to Dem Party policy. Randi and Mulgrew follow the same policy - talk a game, but do nothing. Our union no longer even bothers to talk a game.

Follow Norms dictum: Watch what they do, not what they say. UFT/AFT real policy echoes the policies of corp dems. Remember - Mulgrew was a Biden Delegate to the 2020 Dem convention - which by the way Randi joined in the refusal to include Medicare for All on the platform.

Fragmenting is a perfect word by Dr. Moore at our rally Wednesday at the UFT DA. Fragmentation is a key to the privatization movement in healthcare and other industries. Do you recognize it from the charter school fragmentation of the public school system? It's the same neo-liberal de-regulation (airlines, trucking, railroads) bug that stuck us 40 years ago under the right wing philosophy of government-bad, private- good. How's the total unregulated fragmented trucking situation working out?

Along with neo-liberalism privatization comes the destruction and undermining of unions. [See above - Biden is more humane at managing the decline of labor, which makes him more "pro-union" than Obama and Clinton.] What took place in the private union sector is hitting the public union sector, which has been the strongest part of the remnant of the union movement.

What has been fooling people is that our own union leaderships are taking the shortsighted approach of being handmaidens to private interests. Our teacher union leaders especially have been such handmaidens, even in education. For 30 years until Bloomberg went to far and embarrassed the UFT leadership by closing 19 schools in one shot, they didn't really oppose closing schools, nor did they really oppose the charter school movement, despite the obvious outcome like we saw in New Orleans of the destruction of the entire public school system and its replacement by non-unionized charters -- a wake-up call of sorts.

Do we as union members even have a say in such decisions? Not according to Mulgrew -

MICHAEL MULGREW:THE UFT DECIDER; WHY NOT LET MEMBERS DECIDE ON MEDICARE ADVANTAGE?

When an entire organization has built its image and its message on the "fact" that they have never made a mistake - well, that's where Unity has landed. Unity - according to themselves - are never wrong. They never apologize, because to admit error is to blow up their myth of infallibility.... Arthur Goldstein, Shirking--Our National Pastime

 

We in Retiree Advocate, the UFT caucus representing the dissidents in the UFT retiree chapter, which has 60k members. Mulgrew and Unity hacks have mocked the Retiree Advocate resistance on the healthcare issue as being a tiny dissident and even anti-union group. Really?

 

In the last two significant elections in the UFT, the chapter election in 2021 and the 2022 general election, 30% of the voters vote for us. That's over 8,000 in last year's election. Tiny? We've even been hearing from Mulgrew's own caucus - Unity - retirees and even current working members - that they support us even if they can't do so publicly.

So the rally we called for this past Wednesday in front of the UFT Delegate Assembly, was for me a test of sorts. How many people would show up on a cold day, a few days before Xmas? I have to admit, I was very presently surprised at the showing - around 125 people. And there were speakers using the brand new RA bullhorn. Since we heard of the healthcare debacle, RA has been outside every DA - sometimes with a few people, sometimes with large rallies. We work in consort with our United for Change friends who are delegates.

A friend who is in mid-career and active politically in the UFT half-jokingly said what's the use of these rallies since Mulgrew doesn't give a shit. He  misses the point. I don't see a rally as a means of influencing Mulgrew but as a way to build capacity of people to fight back. I'd bet if thousands of retirees showed up Mulgrew would notice. I don't expect that to happen but I actually thought we might have a dozen instead of ten times that number last week. so who knows?

 Ok, let's get to the business of the rally. Here's a short video I believe edited and produced by our leader, Gloria Brandman -- the one who does the most work.

 https://youtu.be/v1KBrGvwuZU

 

  

 

 

Scores came out despite the freezing cold to yesterday's Rally and March to tell our union leaders that we will not let them take away the healthcare we'd been promised. NO to Medicare Advantage! Take a look.

 

 

Dr. Donald Moore at 12/21 Rally

https://youtu.be/e1w86PkghVY

 

 

 

 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/bHaLWp5uhz5WkW4c8

 

 

Don't miss this by Nick Bacon:

 

New Action – UFT

Why UFT members don’t get a vote on Healthcare – Notes on the December DA There are two stories on the December, 2022 DA. One is the protest outside the DA, where hundreds of retirees and supporters gathered in front of 52 Broadw...   

 

And a comment from Arthur's blog:

Who Spreads Misinformation to UFT?

UFT's Unity Caucus says dissidents are spreading misinformation. I guess I'm a dissident, now that I've decided retiree benefits should not be cut. Leadership's decision to encourage cuts by pitting in-service members against retirees goes against everything a union should stand for.

Leadership now cries anyone who doesn't follow the party line is a liar. This, of course, is their standard MO. And make no mistake, it's argumentum ad hominem, the practice of insulting your opponent rather than engaging in honest discourse. It's logical fallacy. That's what you go to when you do not, in fact, have an actual argument.

There's no reflection, and no introspection. There's not even the echo of a thought that anything could have been done better. This is the way it is, this is the way it's always been, and if you would only clamp down your festering gob, it could be this way forever. 

I expect this sort of thing from morally bankrupt politicians, the DOE and  imagination-challenged administrators. Lately, though, it's exactly what I get from my union leadership. In 2018, filled with hubris from a 2014 deal, they made a supreme screw-up, one of their very worst. Self-funding a raise is a terrible idea even if it works, as it seemed to in 2014. When it does not, like now, it's far worse.  

 

When an entire organization has built its image and its message on the "fact" that they have never made a mistake - well, that's where Unity has landed. Unity - according to themselves - are never wrong. They never apologize, because to admit error is to blow up their myth of infallibility.

NYC Retirees Protest Attempts to Push Them into Privatized Health Care

Labor News

We reprint below an article from the labor website Work-Bites by its editor Joe Maniscalco. Reprinted by permission.

Giving ‘em Hell For The Holidays…

DEC 22

 

https://www.spotlightonlabor.com/labor-news/nyc-retirees-protest-attempts-to-push-them-into-privatized-health-care/

 

NYC municipal retirees march down Broadway this week protesting the city’s ongoing campaign to push them into a for-profit, privatized Medicare Advantage plan. Photos by Joe Maniscalco

 

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] can expect to catch a lot more hell from municipal retirees refusing to be pushed into a for-profit, privatized, Medicare Advantage plan.

Roughly one-hundred determined retirees, some of them 80-plus, rallied outside the UFT headquarters at 52 Broadway on Wednesday afternoon before marching onto the MLC offices at 55 Water Street.

“I want to keep the Medicare Senior Care I have now,” 74-year-old DC 37 retiree Aurea A. Mangual told Work-Bites. “I fear I’m not gonna be covered for the Medicare benefits that I have — and these [insurance] people are going to be denying me like they deny other people. If I need an MRI, if I need an echo cardiogram — they’re gonna start denying me, and by the time they approve it — it may be too late for me.”

Mangual recently spent 10 days in the hospital after suffering a heart attack. She spent another nine days hospitalized after complications from a certain medication caused unexpected bleeding and required a blood transfusion.

“I’m due for another surgery,” Mangual said. “I was never sick before, but now I’m starting to feel old, I guess. Everything is falling down, and even though I try to take care of my health, if it runs in the family, things happen.”

Dr. Donald E. Moore is an attending physician at NY Methodist Hospital, as well as a teacher at Weill Cornell Medical College, NYU and Hunter College. He is also board member of the New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.

On Wednesday, he told retirees they can expect to lose portability, access and choice if the Adams administration and the heads of the MLC are successful in pushing them into a for-profit, privatized Medicare Advantage plan.

“There’s so many plans — hundreds of those Part C plans, which means every doctor can’t be in every plan,” Dr. Moore said. “You may find one of your doctors in a plan. But the doctor [your other] doctor wants to refer you to, or you want to go to, will not be in your plan.”

“Fragmenting” traditional Medicare, Dr. Moore added, will only end up costing municipal retirees more money they can ill afford on limited incomes.

More than a year fighting against Medicare Advantage in the courts and on the streets has left many municipal retirees wondering who the heads of the MLC — UFT President Michael Mulgrew, DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido and Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association President Harry Nespoli — actually represent.

“We need to let Michael Mulgrew know he is representing us — not Mayor Adams and his desire to save on healthcare costs,” Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] organizer Sarah Shapiro told the rally. “I think Mike Mulgrew has lost his way; he’s not quite sure what his role is. Is he representing us and the in-service workers — or is he working behind closed doors with Mayor Adams — the so-called arbitrator Martin Sheinman, who has absolutely no jurisdiction over any of this right at this moment — and Henry Garrido and Harry Nespoli.”

Work-Bites reached out to the heads of the MLC for comment, but has not received a response.

“What we really need after a year of bitter fighting about this — is a time-out,” fellow CROC member Martha Cameron said this week.

The organization — one of a large group of New York City retiree organizations fighting to maintain their traditional Medicare coverage — supports a proposal to utilize a half-billion-dollars over the next two years from the city’s Retiree Health Benefits Trust to shore up the ailing Health Insurance Stabilization Fund — from which roughly $1 billion was diverted during the Bill de Blasio era to help pay for UFT raises.

With the Health Stabilization Fund replenished, retirees say the city can then pursue real cost-cutting measures that don’t involve throwing municipal workers under the bus. Those measures include:

*Setting up a municipal self-insurance plan for all active workers, retirees and their dependents.

*Requiring lower costs from private hospitals.

*Consolidating union welfare fund drug plans to better negotiate lower rates for all.

*Auditing current insurance providers for fraud and waste.

*Clamping down on bad insurance management and inefficiencies.

“These are just some of the ways that we can make a longterm solution to these rising healthcare costs,” Cameron continued. “If we go with the plan the MLC and the city are currently fighting for — we do not solve the issue of the Stabilization Fund being used as a slush fund.”

Despite her health challenges, Mangual remains Associate Vice-President for Inter-Union Relations at the DC 37 Retirees Association.

On Wednesday, she reiterated a call made at an earlier DC Retirees Association meeting for members to stop donating to the group’s political action committee.

“Do not give them any more money,” she said, “because we don’t want them to use our money to help political people coming up, while they are hurting the retirees and [active] members.