DC 37 Retirees: AFSCME Takeover is All About Medicare Advantage
The District Council 37 Retirees Association marches with the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees in last year’s Labor Day Parade (Neal Frumkin is at right holding banner, Marianne Pizzitola is behind in dark green). Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
AFSCME, under union President Lee Saunders, says the emergency decision to suspend DC37 Retirees Association officers and lock them out of their offices on February 22, has everything to do with the group’s problematic finances — and nothing to do with them helping the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees successfully beat back the Medicare Advantage push in town. But does it?
It absolutely does, DC37 Retirees Association officers insist. Vice-President of Inter-Union Relations Neal Frumkin tells Work-Bites, “The threat was there in June.”
“There were various things that were said to us at the [June DC37 Retirees Association] meeting,” Frumkin continues, “including that the money we were sending to [New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola’s] organization was being used for purposes that are not legitimate.”
Like what?
According to Frumkin, there was an “allegation that [Marianne] was assisting a candidate for office in one of the DC 37 locals. I spoke to her about that — she assured me that there was no financial assistance given to anybody.”
Indeed, Pizzitola tells Work-Bites the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees didn’t endorse Anthony Gordon for president of DC 37 Local 372 — they merely talked to him about his position on the Medicare Advantage fight.
“We gave him a platform to be able to speak because he wanted to run for president — and we were concerned with union presidents not understanding the whole retiree issue,” Pizzitola says. “We wanted to know where he stood — what what do you know, and what do you support?”
According to Pizzitola, her organization extended the exact same invitation to the Local 372 incumbent — but “they never came back.”
“[AFSCME] seems to be pulling at strings, to be honest,” Pizzitola says. “I think they're going to make any accusation that they can make to see whatever sticks.”
The DC37 Retirees Association decided to pause its regularly occurring contributions to the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees for several months before ultimately deciding to resume them once again a month before AFSCME swooped in, suspended the officers, and changed the locks.
“We were there [during the pandemic] to service our members — and that's what people were doing on the 22nd of February when the AFSCME folks came in,” Frumkin says. “They always say, ‘brothers and sisters.’ They did not treat us like ‘brothers and sisters.’ They treated us like dogs.”
New York City retirees carry banner jeering “MLC Rats” at last year’s Labor Day Parade.
DC37 Retirees Association officers and their supporters will continue to push back against the City of New York’s Medicare Advantage campaign and their AFSCME suspensions at a rally outside the organization’s 75 Maiden Lane offices in Manhattan on Wednesday March 6, at 11 a.m.
Frumkin and his group have been instrumental in helping the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees fight Mayor Eric Adams and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee’s ongoing campaign to strip municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare health insurance benefits and force them into a profit-driven scheme run by private health insurance industry giant Aetna.
In addition to contributing to the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees’ successful legal challenges in court, the DC37 Retirees Association has consistently hit the streets in loud protest along with several other retiree organizations — including a Labor Day Parade showdown between retirees and the heads of the New York AFL-CIO.
And Frumkin dismisses the idea that the DC37 Retirees Association officers are responsible for bungling the group’s tax filings. According to him, DC37 Retirees Association treasurer John Hardisty supplied the organization’s accountant Peter DeCarlo with all the tax forms required by the IRS.
“He was never told that what he gave was insufficient,” Frumkin says. “Never got a call, ‘Hey, John, we need such and such’ — never got a call like that. And as far as he was concerned, Mr. DeCarlo was taking care of things. At a certain point, when we found out that there was a problem, we called up and we spoke to DeCarlo and DeCarlo said, ‘I will take care of it. It's not a problem; I've been behind on the work I do for other DC 37 entities. We'll take care of it.”
Work-Bites reached out to DeCarlo for a comment and is awaiting a reply.
Pizzitola, meanwhile, concedes her organization has had to reclassify its nonprofit classification with the IRS from a 501c3 to a 501c5 — but that “under the terms of what we were doing, we didn't do anything wrong.”
She further points out that there are other DC 37 locals who’ve had their tax-exempt status revoked, but have not been put into receivership.
Retired EMS first responder and New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola at a City Hall rally against Medicare Advantage last June.
AFSCME moved in and put DC 37 Local 1549 into receivership in September 2022, claiming that the group’s finances constituted an “emergency situation.”
Ousted Local 1549 officers who jeered DC 37’s “autocratic'“ and “anti-democratic” leadership at the time, claimed they had become “collateral damage” in what amounted to a political “coup.”
IS AFSCME REALLY ALL IN ON TRADITIONAL MEDICARE?
In 2014, AFSCME resolved to “develop campaigns to engage and educate workers and general public in the importance of sustaining the Medicare program for future generations” in a special “Protecting Medicare” resolution passed at its 41st International Convention in Chicago.
In subsequent years, it has celebrated AFSCME retirees fighting back against backdoor efforts to gut Social Security and Medicare.
In 2022, the organization passed another resolution called “Enhancing Medicare to Include Dental, Hearing, and Vision Coverage” at another international convention.
Today, however, AFSCME DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido is part of the triumvirate of MLC leaders in New York City working hard with Mayor Adams to force profit-driven “Medicare dis-Advantage” onto municipal retirees.
"This administratorship is about putting the Retirees Association’s affairs back in order so we can continue to organize effectively for the issues they care about, including making sure that retirees have the best health care possible,” AFSCME Retirees Director and newly-appointed DC 37 Retirees Association Administrator Ann Widger told Work-Bites via email.
“The best health care possible” is a far cry from AFSCME’s stated goal to protect and enhance traditional Medicare, however.
MLC Trustee and CWA Local 1180 President Gloria Middleton is already on record telling Work-Bites, “We have to deal with these insurance companies. We just have no choice in that because that's the world.”
Mayor Adams snubbed Frumkin and other members of the DC37 Retirees Association protesting the Medicare Advantage push outside a jobs fair held at Sunset Park High School last August. AFSCME President Lee Saunders had appeared earlier alongside Hizzoner at the same event.
Leonard Polletta, a member of Labor for Traditional Medicare’s Coordinating Committee tells Work-Bites, “Cracking down on retirees protecting something the union says its stands for just shows how unresponsive and oblivious the leadership is of the needs and desires of the membership. The leadership is not fighting — they’re just capitulating to the city.”
And while the rationale for pushing 250,000 New York City municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance plan may be rooted in the 2018 pact between the MLC and then Mayor Bill de Blasio to somehow save the City of New York $600 million a year on healthcare costs — as well as making up for the Health Stabilization Fund that was raided back in 2014 to pay for municipal raises — it’s bigger than that.
As Work-Bites has reported before, the current drive to force privatization on New York City’s retired workforce cannot be divorced from the much larger drive to weaken and privatize traditional Medicare nationwide.