By Joe Maniscalco

The MLC’s [Municipal Labor Committee] ability to legitimately represent public service unions across New York City is openly being called into question this week following Thursday’s weighted vote helping Mayor Eric Adams strip civil service workers of their traditional Medicare health benefits and push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage program run by insurance giant Aetna.

Thursday’s MLC vote on the summary agreement with Aetna went ahead without members actually seeing the finalized contract, various union members abstaining, and lots of shutout retirees calling the whole thing an undemocratic sham.

All that didn’t stop the city, however, from leaping online the very next day to proclaim its intention to “implement a Medicare Advantage program for City retirees and their eligible dependents age 65 and over as of September 1, 2023.”

“If the city is going to negotiate with the Municipal Labor Committee for our health benefits then the Municipal Labor Committee needs to represent all of our union rank and file members,” Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] member Sarah Shapiro told Work-Bites ahead of a March 9, mobilization against the Medicare Advantage push kicking off outside the National Museum of the American Indian near Battery Park. “It’s a sham if two unions vote and control the entire decision. That system is not working for all of us — and we have to change that.”

Fellow CROC member and former public school teacher Gloria Brandman confronted United Federation of Teachers [UFT] President Michael Mulgrew — one of the principal MLC heads — at an earlier union meeting with retirees and called him out on the MLC’s “weighted” voting procedures that all but guarantee decisions go the way District Council 37 and the UFT want them to go.

“He [Mulgrew] said it was an appropriate vote,” Brandman told Work-Bites. “I pointed out that, in fact, it’s a weighted vote…you’re gonna talk about everyone has an equal say, and yet in the Municipal Labor Committee it’s okay for you to have a bigger say then anyone else.”

As Work-Bites reported here earlier, the situation has left some inside the MLC feeling like their votes simply don’t matter.

In fact, Marianna Pizzitola, president of The New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, says unions that have been contacting her organization are wondering if they should even continue paying dues and remain members of the MLC.

“Why do you belong to a group that doesn’t give you equal value…and [UFT President] Michael [Mulgrew] is an emperor and [District Council 37 Executive Director] Henry [Garrido] is an emperor?” Pizzitola said in a recently-posted YouTube video.

Pizzitola issued a statement immediately after the Aetna vote calling the Medicare Advantage push “dangerous and unprecedented,” and is urging MLC members who have reservations about it to “challenge that vote on the way they handled it.”

Stu Eber, president of the Council of Municipal Retiree Organizations of New York City [COMRO), says what we are seeing as the Adams administration continues its drive to strip municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare coverage is a “union movement being divided.”

“Only five unions voted against the Alliance contract in 2021. Last week, there were 25 No votes, 14 No shows, and 10 Abstentions,” Eber told Work-Bites in an e-mail. “Barely half of the 102 members voted Yes for the Aetna contract. Preserving our original Medicare with no cost supplemental Medicare is of paramount importance for the health of 240,000 retirees and our dependents.”

Retired UFT Special Eduction teacher Bennett Fischer brought a neon-yellow-and-green placard declaring, “Aetna, Schmaetna Let Us Vote!” to last Thursday’s mobilization against the Medicare Advantage push.

The 66-year-old Brooklynite still remembers before retiring his union warned him and his colleagues, “Whatever you do — don’t go on Medicare Advantage.”

“Within a matter of months they changed their tune,” Fischer told Work-Bites. “I think that the problem with the MLC is what’s wrong with a lot of the municipal union leadership that we have here — and that is they’re not representative of their memberships inside the union.”

Fisher added, “So many of them became company unions who are working with the mayor and OLR [Office of Labor Relations] — looking after their interests and trying to save them money  — instead of trying to save our health.”

Retiree Roberta Pikser told Work-Bites that although the UFT does allow retirees to vote, “The party that has been in power for many years keeps a tight rein on how those elections come out.”

“As to what concerns us here,” Pikser added, “the MLC allows no rank and file workers or retirees to be party to its decisions. Thus, while in-service people may or may not have some control over health care decisions via elections in their unions — retirees have absolutely no voice in what is being negotiated for them and what is being done to them with regard to health insurance.”

The Professional Staff Congress, representing CUNY faculty and staff, as well as other retiree groups have plans to both save the city money and preserve retirees’ traditional Medicare coverage. But the Adams administration insists on privatization through Medicare Advantage.

The New York City Council, Eber says, needs to “begin the work of bringing retirees and other stakeholders together to implement the PSC’s plan while using reserve funds to pay for supplemental Medicare for two years.”

“We should not be held captive by the City’s Office of Management and Budget’s ill conceived plan,” Eber said. “And ‘We’ means all New York City employees and retirees and our dependents.”