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By Joe Maniscalco

Propaganda session? Some kind of weird one-way webinar where attendees agonizing over the privatization of their traditional Medicare benefits were first urged to go get a flag and recite the pledge before getting any answers?

The Zoom meeting DC 37 Retirees Association Administrator Ann Widger held with members last month is being called a lot of things. The one thing New York City municipal retirees fighting the campaign to push them into a profit-drive Medicare Advantage plan are not calling it, however, is a membership meeting.

Virtual membership meetings, as spelled out in the DC 37 Retirees Association’s constitution, require things like being able to identify who else is in the membership meeting with you, and being able to communicate with your fellow members while the meeting is in progress.

None of that happened on April 25, according to the DC 37 Retirees Association members Work-Bites interviewed following the event.

AFSCME swooped in three months ago and seized control of the DC 37 Retirees Association after members stubbornly refused to stop supporting the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees in its bold bid to successfully block the imposition of a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan on 250,000 New York City municipal retirees. 

The entire DC 37 Retirees Association was put into receivership and its officers suspended on February 22.

The parent union, under AFSCME President Lee Saunders, claims the DC 37 Retirees Association’s failure to file its tax returns properly constituted a fiscal emergency and necessitated the takeover.

“It appears to me that the [AFSCME] administratorship is superseding the constitution of the Retirees Association,” DC 37 Retirees Association member Neal Frumkin tells Work-Bites. “[Widger] hasn't said so directly, but from what I gather from other locals—I spoke to somebody from Local 1549—and basically, it sounds similar [to the way] that they superseded the constitution of 1549.”

DC 37 Local 1549 represents more than 10,000 clerical workers throughout New York City. In 2022, AFSCME moved in and put them into receivership, too. Blackballed members called DC 37’s leadership under Executive Director Henry Garrido and AFSCME’s decision to take over their local—“anti-democratic” and “autocratic.”

“That [April] meeting, to me, was not a membership meeting,” Frumkin continued. “Our membership meetings are supposed to be conducted based on Robert's Rules of Order—and that webinar was not conducted in that way.”

Marianne Pizzitola, retired EMS worker and head of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, summarized April’s Zoom meeting with Widger as largely an appeal for retirees to continue supporting the union’s political action committee, and some talk about hearing and dental benefits thrown in before it was closed out.

“You couldn’t see how many peopler were in the meeting,” Pizzitola tells Work-Bites. “This was a propaganda meeting.”

Section 6, part C of the  DC 37 Retirees Association’s constitution states: “The method of virtual meeting selected must provide members with the opportunity to hear and speak to each other simultaneously and shall allow for the accurate recording of meeting minutes.”

So, did the AFSCME administratorship violate the DC 37 Retirees Association’s constitution with its very strange Zoom meeting  last month? That’s what it looks like.

Work-Bites reached out to AFSCME for this story, but the union declined to comment.

One thing the April Zoom meeting did accomplish, according to Frumkin, is clearly show how the DC 37 Retirees Association was millions of dollars in the black prior to AFSCME putting it under administratorship — and actually far from being in fiscal straits.

So, why the takeover? Work-Bites wanted to know that, too. But, again, no comment from AFSCME.

The union—which purports to be an advocate for strengthening traditional Medicare—also declined to clarify its position on profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans threatening traditional Medicare. 

DC 37, under the leadership of Executive Director Henry Garrido, is one of the major players spearheading the Medicare Advantage push in New York City, along with UFT President Michael Mulgrew and Municipal Labor Committee Chair Harry Nespoli.

All of this, of course, comes at a time when a new sense of rising militancy and union democratization is sparking fresh life inside the American labor movement. 

In contrast, decades of stagnant old guard leadership devoted to collaborating with the bosses have reduced union membership to where it’s at today—roughly 10 percent of the workforce. 

That’s what makes labor’s sloppy embrace of profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans and the abandonment of traditional Medicare—one of the movement’s signature achievements—so curious.

As Work-Bites has routinely found—many would more accurately call that appalling.

The DC 37 Retirees Association is supposed to conduct its next membership meeting later this month on May 30.