Listen: Why Municipal Retirees Aren’t Causing NYC’s Money Woes

Marianne Pizzitola, president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees and Fire Department EMS Retirees Association. Photo by Joe Maniscalco

By Bob Hennelly with Joe Maniscalco

Despite two consecutive losses in court and ample evidence that Medicare Advantage is a bad deal for seniors — the City of New York continues to push it’s municipal retirees into a privatized for-profit health insurance plan.

The Adams administration and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee insist healthcare costs are bleeding the city dry.

But on this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, Marianne Pizzitola, president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees and Fire Department EMS Retirees Association, says "It’s not Medicare eligible retirees’ benefits that are bankrupting the city, or taxing the city — it is healthcare as a whole.”

Pizzitola also calls the idea of the city somehow being able to use its “institutional weight” to keep private for-profit health insurance companies in line “absurd.”

“If they were able to do that they would have been doing it this entire time and we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Pizzitola says.

Also on this week’s show, veteran locomotive engineer Matt Parker, of the Union Pacific Railroad and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen as well as the Railway Workers United, talks about how the failure to address “quality of life issues” could still lead to “potential disagreements between labor and management” and a massive railroad strike.

Listen to the whole show below in its entirety, including an interview with RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum who talks about his union’s ongoing efforts to successfully organize the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.