The UFT Opposition: Watch What They Do, Not What They Say

Watch what the UFT opposition does, and you will see that they don’t understand the responsibilities of union leadership, and they don’t know how to do the work of leading.

Norm Scott, a good-natured kvetch with a long history in the UFT opposition, has lately taken to saying of the Unity Caucus, “watch what they do, not what they say.” I like Norm’s adage: by all means, watch what the Unity Caucus does. In fact, I like Norm’s advice so much that I want to apply it not just to the Unity Caucus, but to the UFT opposition as well.

Last year’s chapter elections put the opposition Retiree Advocate (RA) caucus at the helm of the UFT Retiree Chapter. The new Retiree Chapter Executive Board includes supporters of two different opposition slates – ARISE and ABC – that are organizing for this spring’s UFT elections. (ARISE is a coalition of historic opposition caucuses – MORE, New Action, and the majority of RA; ABC is a new, social media-based group which is supported by a minority in RA.)

Watching what the Retire Chapter leadership has done, as opposed to what they say, is instructive on what we could expect to see if the opposition were to win this spring’s elections for the UFT’s leadership.

The Retiree Advocate slate was elected with a clear mandate to defend the traditional Medicare against New York City’s plans to move its retirees into a Medicare Advantage plan: this was the only issue it ran on, and it won the day with a substantial margin of victory. In response to the elections, the UFT leadership ended the union’s engagement with the city’s efforts. The December Delegate Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution from the Retiree Chapter affirming this new position, with a strengthening amendment offered by UFT Secretary LeRoy Barr – “the UFT will never force retirees into a Medicare Advantage program.” We made a mistake by engaging with the City on this issue, the UFT leadership acknowledged. We have fixed it, and we won’t make that mistake again.

Is this not a good moment for the RA caucus to take credit for its role in changing the UFT’s position and move on to other pressing matters? It seems reasonable that a Retiree Chapter leadership with a mandate to defend traditional Medicare would want to beat back the very grave threats to the retirement security of UFTers – to both our Medicare and our Social Security – that have taken shape in Washington DC because of the November election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority Congress.

How serious are these dangers? Project 2025, a 900 page master plan for the first six months of the Trump administration developed by the Heritage Foundation, put a target on the back of Medicare with the declaration that “our [federal government] deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.” It has proposed moving all new Medicare recipients into a default Medicare Advantage option, along with massive cuts to Medicaid. Taken together, Project 2025 proposals would slash both programs, and result in the loss of health care insurance to millions of American now covered through the Affordable Care Act.

Trump and MAGA Republicans are already hard at work implementing the Project 2025 agenda. Shortly after the election, Trump created a Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as its co-heads. Those two billionaires are now promoting massive cuts to the federal government. Musk has told Senate Republican leadership that he wants to cut 1/3 of the federal budget; given that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid together constitute 60% of that budget, such a target would require draconian cuts to these three programs. Ramaswamy says he will target massive “waste” and “fraud” in Social Security and Medicare: “there are hundreds of billions of dollars flowing out the door of all of those programs ending up in the hands of people who, even under the statute, should not be receiving those payments,” he told Axios, without the slightest evidence to support these extreme claims. With one of the main authors of Project 2025 heading up Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, these promises of immense cuts to the entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security cannot be written off as empty threats.

Another threat to retired Americans comes from the Republican Study Committee, representing the entire Republican House leadership and 80% of the Republican House caucus. It has called for raising the retirement age for receiving full Social Security benefits by two years, to age 69, and for lowering the level of benefits new retirees would receive. These changes would disproportionately impact middle- and low-income retirees, and would result in a 13% cut to benefits, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Given these very real dangers and the mandate on which the Retiree Chapter leadership was elected, one would think that it would be sounding the alarm and mobilizing the troops for the coming battle. The UFT Retiree Chapter is not just the largest group of education union retirees in the country; it has members in every state, including states with Republican members of Congress who will have to be pressured to oppose these attacks on Medicare and Social Security. There is important work to do.

Heed Norm Scott’s advice: don’t watch what the opposition leadership of the UFT Retiree Chapter says, watch what it does. At the December meeting of the Retiree Chapter, with 1300 members attending in person and on Zoom, there was not a single mention of these dangers to Medicare and Social Security. Instead, precious meeting time was dedicated to a discussion of the proposed New York Health Act (NYHA) with its main sponsor State Senator Gustavo Rivera, apparently because Marianne Pizzitola has what she describes as a close working relationship with him. NYHA would replace traditional Medicare with health insurance provided by New York State; when questions were raised about how that would impact tens of thousands of UFT retirees who live in other states where health care providers could refuse to accept NYHA, Rivera’s reply was that this was an implementation issue which would be worked out after the bill was passed. When many UFT retirees expressed understandable concern over why the Chapter meeting would be entertaining a plan to replace traditional Medicare, the answer provided by the Chapter leadership was that “it was just a discussion.”

This response leads us to ask: Why would any “discussion” take precedence over the important work that needs to be done to defend Medicare and Social Security? The next Chapter meeting will be in March, when we will be two months into a Trump administration and a Republican Congress. The Retiree Chapter leadership has given them a two-month head start to attack Medicare and Social Security before it starts organizing a response.

It is a telling lapse on the part of the opposition forces now at the helm of the Retiree Chapter. Their working assumption is that they can continue to do what they have always done – dedicate all their time and energy to criticism of the UFT leadership – while counting on the Unity Caucus members in that leadership to do the important work of the union. It is certainly true that Unity Caucus members such as UFT President Michael Mulgrew and AFT President Randi Weingarten will ensure that our union is fighting the necessary fight against the attacks on Medicare and Social Security. But what they can’t do, what only the leadership of the Retiree Chapter can do, is educate and mobilize the membership of the chapter. Being critical critics does little damage when you don’t have the responsibilities of actual leadership; it is an entirely different matter when you hold leadership positions.

Watch what the UFT opposition does, and you will see that they don’t understand the responsibilities of union leadership, and they don’t know how to do the work of leading.