RTC Meeting Handout - December 2023

Fighting Together for Retiree Rights

and wishing you a happy holiday season and a premium and co-pay free New Year!

 

A casual observer, listening to President Mulgrew's responses to questions at the November RTC meeting, would assume that our president has been battling the city for years, instead of working with the city to take away the retiree health benefits that UFT educators earned during our careers.

Mulgrew knows how to pivot away from tough questions. He knows how to respond with confusing words and incomplete sentences, circle back to a tangential topic, with the question magically reframed as UFT vs NYC and Mulgrew as our savior.

We heard some whoppers at last month's meeting:

  • Mulgrew said the reason he did not fight EmblemHealth's illegal attempt to charge us copays for Senior Care was because those copays were meant to be temporary!
  • Mulgrew told us he is still lobbying the City Council to amend City Code 12-126! He's still working to remove our healthcare price protections from NYC law and put them in his own hands.
  • Then he will give us a "choice" of staying in Medicare + Senior Care if we pay our own premiums and copays!

 

UFT retirees know better:

  • We know that EmblemHealth's copays are designed to coerce us into Medicare Advantage.
  • We know that Code 12-126 is the only thing that prevents the city, the insurance companies, and the MLC from eliminating our cost-free plans.
  • We know that Mulgrew's idea of "choice" will cost us $200 a month per person and rising.

Why does the UFT Retired Teachers Chapter go along with Mulgrew's malarkey? Can't we have a Retired Teachers Chapter that does all the great things it does now - provide information about retirement and union issues, engage retirees in political activity, provide us with social and educational opportunities, and support our working colleagues - without agreeing with every cockamamie policy Mulgrew pushes?

Can't we have an RTC Chapter Leader who stands up to Mulgrew when he's wrong? We can! If we elect the Retiree Advocate/UFT slate in the spring chapter election.

Retiree Advocate's members have thousands of collective years of UFT experience. Many are former chapter leaders, exec board members, and even UFT officers. And, like most of us, all of them spent their careers in NYC classrooms rather than in UFT offices.

Tom Murphy is fond of calling us "Michael's Army," but we are not Michael’s army. We are the UFTs army. We work for union values and union ideals, not for any man. We need elected delegates and officers who are free to vote their conscience, not as the man, or the Unity caucus, tells them to vote. The Retired Teachers Chapter must work with our union president, but not for our president. We can have an independent RTC, if we vote for Retiree Advocate/UFT in the spring chapter elections.

VOTE  for Retiree Advocate/UFT

Join Retiree Advocate/UFT Info: [email protected]