Showing posts with label Unity Caucus/UFT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unity Caucus/UFT. Show all posts

Sunday, April 24, 2022

How UFT Election2022 is different? Reasons #5 Unity Suppresses democracy, #6 more people activated, #7 UFT seen as incompetent, #8 Social Media, #9 GOTV

Unity Titanic ad is a perfect meme for Unity campaign.

 
Sunday, April 24, 2022
Here is Part 3 of my series of reasons the 2022 UFT election differs from past elections. Previous posts covered reasons #1-4.

 Before going on, let me recommend the great Jon Halabi series on "What if UFC wins?" - the current entry relates to some of the issues below and is actually a supplement to how things have deteriorated inside the UFT:  

which leads to my own #5 reason for how this election is different.

#5  The suppression of democracy has reached new heights under Mulgrew and his henchmen and women and has sparked anger, frustration and a fervent move to the opposition, even by former supporters or neutral people.

Talk to some key people in the opposition like Nick Bacon and Daniel Alicea this time over what moved them into activism against Unity and their answer hinges on how they tried to become active in moving certain issues and were blokced at every turn through parliamentary measures to outright suppression. You might say that the rank and file doesn't give a crap about internal democracy in the UFT. And that is true. But people like them have a wide net of influence in their own schools and beyond. A year ago there were people talking abotu working with the leadership to craft a way to end mayoral control, taking Mulgrew's vague expression of dissatisfaction with mayoral control seriously. I told them that he and the UFT would always support mayoral control no matter what Mulgrew says -- watch what they do, not what they say. 

A recent article on the current state of the debate on mayoral control where Mulgrew calls for tweaks that amount to moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Michael Mulgrew, who heads the city’s teachers union, has called for fixed terms for PEP members and previously said he is in favor of mayoral control, but with changes. "We have been consistent in saying we support mayoral control, but our current system needs greater checks and balances and more avenues for meaningful parental input," Mulgrew said in a statement.

When key people realize that the leadership is often full of bullshit they can be moved to an extraordinary level of activism and become major influenceers. Though that has happened at times in the past when new stars arise (see Julie Cavnagh c. 2009-2013), this time there seems to be a lot more of them, each with a sphere of influence.

Even a mild dose of reform and democracy could have deflected or delayed some of them but Mulgrew and his tight circle chose to crack down and shut out any voices of opposition or criticism.

That has led to the next item.

#6 The large number of people activated compared to the past

Unity has always had an army and still has its army. Has it grown this year? Probably not. In fact we hear stories of shrinkage (see #1). On the other hand, I've seen an oppo army grow that is five- ten times from what I've seen in the past. Unlike the top tier of Unity which is office based (see Halabi brilliant post comparing the Unity and UFC Ex bd at large candidates top employ laden for Unity vs classroom teachers for UFC.-- United Federation of ________???.

Enthusiasm for union organizing -- people not just in election campaign -- but truly as a long-term project -- organizing = relationships 

 The number of distributors has allowed UFC to reach many more mailboxes. Of course Unity does what it always does -- use its union employee force to stuff every box in the city. (See my UFT Election 2022: Unity Caucus Theft of Service - District Reps are a Major culprit). 

So while Unity has remained the same, UFC has gone way beyond the past. But a key question: Does stuffing the boxes mean much? I never gave it much credit in the past. Unity stuffs every box -- maybe over 100K but actually gets a relatively few working UFT members to vote for them. If the oppo also stuffed every box I don't believe that would affect the outcome. though surely get some increase in votes. If this election is close and UFC loses we would take a look at that factor by checking the schools we flyered.

Historically Unity opponents didn't have the outreach to get to many schools and retirees have taken on the task from the different caucuses. New Action had the biggest group and hit many schools, yet their numbers over the years have not been good - they finished last in the 2019 election and I'd bet they had more leaflets out than the other caucuses. 
 
This year we carved the city up into areas convenient to where people lived. MORE and Solidarity and New Action had so much outreach we didn't have to blanket the city and acted as fill-in people.

Using the Titanic as an ad for Unity is very appropriate
  • The funniest example of Unity cluelessness is worth repeating

 #7 Poor service and bad decision making, neutralizing key Unity supporters
There is a perception that even things that used to work well in the union has undergone some deterioration.  And this runs throughout the union.
My friend in California called the union for a simple question for her taxes. She was told she'd get a call back. Two weeks later with no response she called again. Message taken - no call back. She stopped calling.
Calls coming in about  ineptness on multiple levels. Someone gets a pension consultation. The Unity person emails her a flyer promoting Unity.  This is the tip of the iceberg.
The Unity leadership at the very least used to be able to deliver fundamental services. People are noticing the decline.
#8: Social Media campaign
This is the first election where social media may make a difference. Unity has a big campaign but so does UFC with a strong media team with a strategy to hit back hard and fast at Unity. Given we relied on in school outreach in the past, this has the potential to reach a lot more people. Will it get out the vote? Which leads to - 
#9 - A Get Out the Vote campaign by both sides  - but UFC has the greater potential
We have understood that increased turnout helps the opposition and Unity attempts are aimed at its own base it seems. UFC also aims at its base but also has more people doing personal calling and outreach. I'm intrigued by how the numbers will look. I pointed out in #3 that I expect retiree vote to go up by 20-25%. If I'm wrong that will tell me something about the impact of the various campaigns over MulgewCare because if more people vote the majority will be against Mulgrew, though some will be due to an aggressive Unity campaign with Unity retirees- of whom there are many.
What some of us have detected is a lack of enthusiasm from some Unity people in the campaign and they are not rousing their own colleagues like they might have in the past. When Unity CL of major large high schools openly criticize Mulgrew I can't imagine how hard they are campaigning.

I know of a few cases where Unity asked people to run for certain position and they declined, with one of them running for a prominent position with UFC. That is a danger sign for a one party system.

If you want an idea for a GOTV on your part --

If you have your coworkers' personal email addresses or cell phone numbers, another option that might work would be sending them a digital flier. You can see all of the fliers that we have on social media at:

https://www.facebook.com/108634608304213/posts/150858087415198/?d=n

https://www.instagram.com/p/CcAyFI_uoZM/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

https://twitter.com/ufcuft/status/1511710483094679555?s=21&t=SUP5qEsg8p5uh38KaDNNMQ

There is one new how-to-vote flier available at: http://bit.ly/ufcvote

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Friday, March 11, 2022

Norm goes deep into #MulgrewCare: appears on Podcast, Lander Says NO to MulgrewCare, Ravages of our profit-making medical system

I went to one of my doctors yesterday and he's trying to pressure me into taking an expensive test I clearly don't need. The naked profit motive. Medicare will pay but I'm conscious of how that undermines Medicare in the long run. I'd be acting like Mulgrew. I won't do it. In the podcast I delve into the ideology of the UFT/Unity caucus that leads to decisions like pushing MulgrewCare and also 20 years ago, privatized education like charters. 

the advertising, the television commercials, the hamburger sliders, the endless catered lunches, the agency money, the plane tickets to Europe — are all, directly or not, contributing to this enormous cost.” --- This is what Mulgew supports.

 Norm - in his usual fog.


UnitedForChange - UFT
@ufcuft
Worth the listen! Norm Scott unpacks the failed attempt by@UFTUnity to privatize retiree Medicare with Mulgrewcare
@NormScott1has been a tireless union activist & once again proving his mettle in helping to lead organize our petition campaign.

Nice words from my UFC colleagues.

What a pleasure to Zoom meet Noah who interviewed me for his Professional Development: The New York City Teacher Podcast Monday night. He certainly does his research and the hour spent talking to a young NYC teacher was a pleasure - and I just signed up as a patron to get all his podcasts. He has been doing it since July and I am addicted, catching up on back issues. I first heard his of him with his Nick Bacon interview on the Feb. DA which was excellent: Ep 29- What REALLY Happened at the February DA.mp3

Hey Norm,

The show is up and ready to be heard! It can be found at the following locations (among others):

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63597160

Ep 31- Mulgrewcare, feat. Norm Scott.mp3

This week Norm Scott, a retired NYC DOE teacher, long-time unionist, and blogger, stops by to tell us all about Mulgrewcare, a foiled (or is it?) attempt by the UFT leadership to deprive retirees of their proper, hard-earned benefits OR balance the books after a poorly-executed contract negotiation by collecting their hard-earned money in the form of new, illegal premiums for the same coverage they have always had. We discuss the parallels between Unity's willingness to privatize healthcare and the neoliberal drive to privatize schools, most notably via the charter movement, and much more!

This week Norm Scott, a retired NYC DOE teacher, long-time unionist, and blogger, stops by to tell us all about Mulgrewcare, a foiled (or is it?) attempt by the UFT leadership to deprive retirees of their proper, hard-earned benefits OR balance the books after a poorly-executed contract negotiation by collecting their hard-earned money in the form of new, illegal premiums for the same coverage they have always had. We discuss the parallels between Unity's willingness to privatize healthcare and the neoliberal drive to privatize schools, most notably via the charter movement, and much more! Read more of Norm's work at ednotesonline.com

More on MulgrewCare

Lander calls on Adams to ditch new NYC retiree Medicare plan after court order - New York Daily News

Emphasizing the cruelty of Mulgrew in opposing true cost-saving solutions to costs of medical services by favoring profit making private insurance and degrading the public options.

"survived the ongoing catastrophe of for-profit medical care.... a ready solution to the problem — which, Maloney implies, is inseparable from the very structures of capitalism."

And one thing we know- in the 60 years of Unity Caucus leadership of the UFT, unmitigated support for the unfettered outrages of capitalism

 

NYT Book Review By Sarah Manguso

COST OF LIVING

Essays

By Emily Maloney

The illness narrative, ending in financial ruin and decreased quality of life, has become one of the classic 21st-century American stories. In her debut essay collection, Emily Maloney documents the complex intersections of money, illness and medicine. For Maloney, the primary experience of receiving health care is not merely a bodily or spiritual event but always, also, a financial one. She understands on a granular level the relationship of money to being ill, to developing a drug, to housing and caring for patients and, of course, to managing an unfathomable amount of debt. Her broad perspective is hard won; at different times she has been a multiply diagnosed chronically ill patient, an E.M.T., an emergency room medical technician, a drug rep, a data analyst, a medical writer, a medical debtor and an American citizen who has — so far — survived the ongoing catastrophe of for-profit medical care.

The precipitating event in “Cost of Living” is the author’s psychiatric hospitalization at 19: “It wasn’t that I had wanted to die, exactly. It was more that I just couldn’t keep living.” Maloney’s choice of a nearby, independent hospital’s emergency room over the bigger university hospital “where the state might pick up your bill if you were declared indigent” leads to the crushing debt at the heart of the book. “Sitting on a cot in the emergency room, I filled out paperwork certifying myself as the responsible party for my own medical care — signed it without looking, anchoring myself to this debt, a stone dropped in the middle of a stream. This debt was the cost of living.”

As Maloney pries deeper into the machine of American health care, she finds no central mechanism other than that of the eternal money-go-round. By the time she gets to the conference at which doctors are painstakingly comped for their attendance at brunches with “soggy pastries” amid “transfer of value” concerns, I had lost all hope for a ready solution to the problem — which, Maloney implies, is inseparable from the very structures of capitalism.

Each essay documents a different kind of structural failure, caused or complicated by capital and inevitably ending in harm to patients. In one, Maloney is prescribed 26 psychiatric medications for what turns out to be a vitamin D deficiency, hypothyroidism and a neurologically based developmental disorder. In another, as an E.R. tech she is trained to “bill up” — increasing charges if at all possible — but she secretly perfects the occult art of minimizing patient cost without tripping any corporate alarms.

Embedding herself into various corners of the bureaucratic medical machine, Maloney describes everyone she encounters with the same perspicacity. “There’s a fine line between a pain patient and a drug addict,” she writes, “and sometimes patients go back and forth across it.” “Elizabeth … was what we called a frequent flier, someone who was unable to make sense of the world she lived in and so she came to us instead, a kind of tent revival in our suburban hospital, for healing.” A medical student, meanwhile, is “a strange mix of sweaty and cavalier.”

Thanks to her experiences, Maloney is able to see the cracks in what a less informed patient might experience, simply, as care: “At my doctor’s office for a masked annual physical, my internist depression screens me. I know it’s because Epic, the online medical record system he uses, prompts him to do so. Northwestern Medicine is part of a program that uses an installation of Epic that depression screens everyone.”

While working as a medical publications manager at a pharmaceutical company, where she becomes a part of the conference circuit for the first time, she is struck by the sheer scale of the apparatus. “Yes, the research everyone does is important. Yes, the work to take a drug from preclinical stages to the market is huge and hugely expensive. But the rest — the advertising, the television commercials, the hamburger sliders, the endless catered lunches, the agency money, the plane tickets to Europe — are all, directly or not, contributing to this enormous cost.”

Maloney’s essays read as if they were begun in low light, with little sense of where they were going or how far. They start with a question and work things out on the page. They don’t seem concerned about arriving at a grand unified theory of anything. They notice everything and have nothing to prove. They don’t prematurely grasp at an ending. These qualities combine to elevate this collection far above the usual first-person essayistic fare. The challenges of Maloney’s background — familial trauma, poor medical care, occasional indigence — form part of the back story, but they are ultimately beside the point of this book. Her broad authority and the quality of the prose — astute, compassionate and lethally funny — are what make these essays remarkable. Maloney is an exceptionally alert writer on whom nothing is lost, who sees everything with excruciating clarity, including the unassailable fact that in this country, there is currently no tidy passage through the interconnected quagmires of illness, money and care.

Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books, most recently the novel “Very Cold People.”

 

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