Saturday, April 19, 2025 - ARISE SINKS!
Proof is in the pudding. ARISE is not running against Unity but against ABC.
Holy Cow - ARISE's Bacon increasingly takes the same line as Unity - this time on the Intro 1096 City Council law that so many retirees want to see passed to protect their Medicare. And engages in an attack on Marianne Pizzitola and her enormously successful organizing of retirees to battle for their medicare.
Of course the motivation is that Marianne is supporting ABC and only wishes she would back ARISE and if she did you would never see him writing these comments. Even more interesting to me is that 2 of the 3 legs of ARISE - Retiree Advocate, and his own caucus New Action, are loaded with retirees - in fact 25% (140) of their candidates are retirees, many of them elected to the DA in the massive retiree win in last year's retiree chapter election, which they won with what Nick Bacon would call a "myopic" focus on the healthcare issue - and they won due to the massive support Marianne and her troops gave them. That election and the 75% win by Fix Para Pay are amongst the main forces driving the possibility of defeating Mulgrew -- note there are 70k retirees and 27k paras -- about half the total voting UFT membership.
That FPP is aligned with ABC -- with 120 paras running with ABC - over 20% of the 560 candidates - unprecedented in the history of the UFT - irks ARISE which had reached out to FPP to ask them to run with ARISE, especially since ARISE does not seem to have many - or any - paras on their slate.
Yet, ARISE continues to join in the Unity attacks on ABC for focusing on the issues of most concern to UFT members and attempting to create a broad-based non-sectatarian inclusive movement. Shame, shame, shame.
How does the position of ARISE on intro 1096 - which many of the 300 elected RTC delegates and Exec Bd members support - play out with them or even with the 140 retiree candidates?
This was posted by Dan Alicea on FB:
Whether fueled by political/personal vendettas, unabated paranoia or Mulgrew’s Unity talking points, Nick Bacon, the caucus boss of New Action, now believes full support for Intro 1096 is short-sighted and could adversely hurt active members.This despite an overwhelming majority of UFT retirees voting in favor of a reso in full support of Intro 1096 and their calls for our union to lobby and commit its resources to it.
This is strange since many of those who support the bill and the RTC resolution are RA, and even New Action (NAC) UFT retirees.
UFT retirees, a vote for ARISE is a wasted vote.ARISE never AROSE.Nick has shown his MORE-led, caucus-first coalition is willing to ignore the will of UFT retirees. They are willing to bow to Mulgrew for political gain and election season posturing by pitting actives against retirees.If you think it’s time to replace Mulgrew because our healthcare, pensions and benefits are too important to risk, only ABC offers a steady hand of seasoned union leaders and the unwavering commitment to support the issues that matter to retirees.On May 1st ballots will be mailed to our homes. In May, we take back our union and make MEMBERS FIRST, again!Vote for A Better Contract (ABC)Learn more: http://abettercontract.org
5 comments:
Norm, you know Nick wasn’t calling the law myopic. He’s arguing that attaching a litmus test to endorsements over single issues is myopic. And as much respect as I have for the work NYC Organization of Public Sector Retirees has done, he’s right that we have to think about the broader implications of laws that appear great at first glance. If union lawyers urge caution because it could fun afoul of collective bargaining rights, we need to take breath and actually look into it. As much as I want to see what the bill proposes happen, I’m don’t want to risk that being used by political leaders to chip away—even more than they have— at our hard won rights. And calling Nick a “caucus boss” sounds straight out of the right wing anti-labor playbook.
Retirees are not in unions. We have no concerns other than our healthcare since the United Federation of teachers decided to claw that back to finance a contract.
We didn’t used to have to worry retirement was actually quite peaceful. But for the last four years, we’ve been fighting to protect ourselves from the very people who should’ve been protecting us.
A Retirees issue is singular protecting our benefits
And if Nick was paying any attention, there are three issues that we have raised that fall under our purview. One not being forced into Medicare advantage, and forcing the city to adhere to the promise it made to us and allowing us to stay on traditional Medicare and then paying for it. Not passing back door premiums onto us and the forms of co-pays and deductibles.
Reimbursing our Medicare B premium in less than 16 to 22 months. The unions have failed to fix this for decades.
And lastly, healthcare dies with both active and retired the day we die, leaving our dependence with nothing. They would very quickly have to purchase cobra or a marketplace plan.
These are things that the unions could have fixed and have not
You know what else the unions could’ve fixed? Retirees under 65 on GHI CBP Network. They removed from one of their agreements that a $3 million a year that they could purchase larger networks in areas where there’s a larger population of Retirees. And municipal labor committee chose not to do it. I don’t know what issues Nick doesn’t want me involved in. Seems like he doesn’t want me involved in anything but he wants me involved in everything and then when I do get involved, he wants to yell that I’m involved.
Maybe it would’ve helped if he had more of a Labor education than me then I wouldn’t have to be doing this. And of course like Steve said last week I would’ve had no reason to exist if the Uft hadn’t tried to kill all of us in the first place.
Matt - Aside from the fact that Nick has been on the attack against ABC for months, never missing an opportunity to attack - so yes acting as a caucus boss - including misrepresenting what I said at an exec bd meeting over the issue of running on both slates and taking the side of the bogus Unity argument where they changed their minds after NAC raised objections to allowing people to run on both slates. I pointed to the irony of his calling things myopic when RA and Fix Para Pay ran the same type of campaigns in last year's election. Marianne's campaign helped RA win -- and I wonder it all the rancor over the election would be taking place if RA had lost in the usual manner and this election was like all the others - no chance to win - thus the luxury of running a broader campaign. My analysis is that if we want to win this time, we need to be narrow. If we want to run on the bigger issues that attract their own sectarian voters, that is fine to make a point but not aiming to win. ARISE has indicated in many ways that they know they cannot win and their major goal is to stop ABC from winning or getting more votes than them.
I guess I’m a little confused about how disagreeing publicly with ABC constitutes being a “caucus boss”. That language is just gross coming from group wanting to run the largest teachers local on the country. But ad hominems have become par for the course in ABC and ABC officer candidate writing, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
You’re complaining about Nick “misrepresenting” your comments on not allowing members to run on multiple slates is rich as hell with your framing of his argument that 1096 is “myopic”. You know that’s not what he said.
Matt - Did you see the attacks by David Ginsberg and Nick and some others on ABC and Amy and other leaders over the months while ABC did not respond? Nick is -co-chair of New Action. The NAC people were first out of the box to accuse ABC of being a paid Mulgrew operation with Amy as a front when in fact they all were willing to meet with Amy and what became ABC since last March 2024 and didn't leave ABC until November. I told some NAC leaders I wouldn't bring up their past history publicly unless they continued to spread misinformation. When I pointed out the past failures of NAC, MORE I was criticized for doing so and things like the decade long alliance between NAC and Unity and their being on the payroll was dismissed as "bi-partisanship." Ed Notes has been consistent in criticizing them going back to the original sellout in 2003. They attack the Unity people who have joined the opposition but ignore this history and including the fact that Nick was in Unity when he joined NAC.
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