Why the UFT Opposition Is Missing in Action in the Fight to Defend Social Security and Medicare – And What It Could Mean For the Future of the UFT

On Monday, I examined in some detail the scare campaign that the opposition ABC slate, following the lead of the entrepreneur Marianne Pizzitola, had waged around our UFT pensions, and its failure to take up the fight to defend Social Security and Medicare from the attacks of President Trump and Elon Musk. There is another, continuing dimension to this sordid tale that needs to be discussed. The diversion of the Retiree Chapter from the important struggle against the Trump and Musk attacks on Social Security and Medicare was more than the collateral damage of an unprincipled scare campaign around an election issue. It was the inevitable, perhaps even deliberate, consequence of a political strategy employed by Pizzitola in her business, which ABC has now taken up and is acting as its willing executioner.

This strategy was on full display in the UFT’s April Delegate Assembly, in the consideration of our endorsements for a number of city offices in the June primary elections, mostly City Council seats. Pizzitola’s business has made political endorsements into a one issue litmus test, support for Bill 1096 in the City Council, which Pizzitola says is necessary to protect retirees against Medicare Advantage. The UFT leadership has acknowledged that it was a mistake to cooperate with the City’s efforts to enact Medicare Advantage in the past, and the union is now explicitly opposed to replacing traditional Medicare with Medicare Advantage. However, the union does not support Bill 1096; the union’s lawyers have strongly advised against it, because the legislation as written would create precedents restricting what the UFT could negotiate for members in health care coverage. But for Pizzitola, 1096 is a way to keep alive an issue that is no longer a real matter of contention, given the UFT’s current unqualified opposition to Medicare Advantage. Support for 1096 has become the equivalent of kissing her ring: if an elected official endorses it and opposes the UFT, they have the complete support of her business; if they oppose it and side with the UFT, they are targeted for defeat.

In the UFT, political endorsements for New York City offices are democratically decided in a process that starts with borough-based committees interviewing candidates and making recommendations and concludes at the union’s Delegate Assembly (DA), with representatives from every school and from functional chapters such as the retirees deciding whom to endorse. At the April DA, delegates affiliated with ABC opposed the endorsement of City Council candidates who did not support 1096, following Pizzitola’s direction. They lost the vote, by a 2 to 1 margin among 900 delegates. That is how a democracy works.

There is no analogous democratic decision-making in Pizzitola’s business, no debates over who to endorse and why, no votes on endorsements. People send in donations to support its work – the marketing of the business is quite effective, and has built a loyal donor base – but Pizzitola, with a board of four hand-picked, long-time associates that does not include a single educator or UFT retiree, makes all the decisions. Her message to her donors: There is no need to ask questions or debate strategy, as I know best. Trust me, and follow my lead.

It is instructive to examine what happens with that trust. Among the City Council candidates that Pizzitola has enthusiastically endorsed in the past, and will undoubtedly do again, is Vickie Paladino, a vocal sponsor of 1096 and the most outspoken supporter of Donald Trump in New York City politics. When she ran for City Council in 2021, Paladino told the community publication Bayside Patch that “breaking the back of the corrupt and reprehensible teachers union” was a priority of hers, together with “ending poisonous Critical Race Theory in our schools” and “supporting charter schools and vouchers.” While on the Council, she was removed from her Committee assignment because of anti-LGBTQ remarks characterizing queer people as “sexual groomers.” There are more City Council members from Paladino’s City Council caucus, with similar dispositions, who have supported 1096 and received Pizzitola’s endorsement in return. Pizzitola has endorsed a candidate for mayor, Jim Walden, a Republican turned independent in an Eric Adams-like metamorphosis, who the great preponderance of her donor base would not even recognize, since they were never consulted.

Shortly after Pizzitola went public with her support for ABC, she provided a justification for her endorsement in a “labor history” video that referenced the turn of the 20^th century American labor leader Samuel Gompers. In Pizzitola’s view, Gompers articulated a “bread and butter” unionism, narrowly focused on workplace issues of compensation and working conditions; this, she opines as a retiree member of a different union, is the proper stance for the UFT.[i] According to this view of unionism, UFT unionists should “leave at the door” their “political issues,” their “state issues,” their “federal issues,” their “social justice issues,” their “international issues,” and their “identity issues,” with a specific mention of Jewish and Palestinian identities. Her support for ABC is premised on their adoption of this narrow vision of “bread and butter” unionism.

The wide range of proscribed issues is telling. What are Social Security and Medicare, if not federal government issues? One might think that after years of proclaiming how important traditional Medicare was in the fight against Medicare Advantage, Pizzitola and ABC would be in the vanguard of fighting these “federal issues.” But taking these issues on would put them in direct opposition to what Trump, Musk, and MAGA Republicans are doing, and that would disrupt Pizzitola’s political alliance with Trump supporters such as Paladino. Better to wave the bloody shirt of Medicare Advantage, even though the UFT is now in opposition to it, than address the very real threats to Social Security and Medicare.

There is, unfortunately, ample evidence that ABC has fully embraced this most narrow vision of “bread and butter” unionism. Following Pizzitola, it studiously avoids the issue of the real threats to Social Security and Medicare, despite having devoted gallons of virtual ink to the manufactured pension crisis. It consumed the March Retiree Chapter meeting with that pension issue, when our time could have been spent on planning our response to what is happening in Washington DC. Like Pizzitola and her business, ABC avoids all explicit criticism of Trump, Musk, and MAGA Republicans. In a statement on the indiscriminate mass firings of federal government workers, ABC was unable to bring itself to even name Trump, Musk, and DOGE, much less hold them accountable for their unconscionable actions. Instead, it mumbles a mealy mouthed apology for the firings, filled with emptiest of platitudes:

We recognize that leadership decisions at the highest levels come with difficult choices. And we are aware that the strength of our nation has always been found in the unity of its people. In moments like these, A Better Contract does not point fingers—we lift each other up. We do not divide—we unite. This is not about politics. This is about people.

Little surprise that such a passage is followed not by a call for the reinstatement of federal workers unjustly fired without even the pretense of due process, nor by a call for the restoration of needed government services and programs such as the Department of Education that were decimated by these firings, but by a call for those outside government to provide the fired workers with employment. In the same vein, ABC has not seen fit to condemn Trump’s executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers, for this, too, would require them to hold responsible “he who shall not be named.”

The UFT has a long and proud tradition of pursuing a different vision of unionism, one which we might call – following Harold Gibbons and Ernst Calloway – ‘total person’ unionism. Total person unionism takes up “bread and butter” workplace issues – our compensation, our working conditions, our due process – but it understands that these issues are one part of the totality of who we are and what we need. We want our union to address all our important needs, as workers, as educational and health care professionals, and as citizens in a nation whose democracy is now in peril.

We are educators and retired educators. We want a union that supports our schools against the wealthy and powerful who seek to undermine them with vouchers and charter schools, a union that doesn’t enter into political alliances with self-avowed enemies of public education. We want a union that secures our professional autonomy in the classroom, and supports our professional growth to be the best educators we can be. We want a union that improves our teaching conditions and our students’ learning conditions by taking on fights such as lower class size. We want a union that defends our academic freedom to teach a complete and honest account of our nation’s history, to teach all science, even when it conflicts with political prejudice, and to teach age appropriate literature, including works with characters and themes addressing the realities of marginalized communities and the coming of age struggles of youth – all now under attack, with the Trump White House leading the charge.

We want a union that believes “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and defends the rights and freedoms of all its members. When women members face sexual harassment in the workplace and have their reproductive freedom attacked; when members of color face prejudice and discrimination in schools and in the larger society, and programs to promote racial and ethnic diversity and equity in education are outlawed by the federal government; when immigrant members are scapegoated and unlawfully deported; when LGBTQ members are vilified, and denied the freedom to be who they are and love who they love; and when Jewish, Palestinian, and Muslim members are subjected to hate, discrimination, and violence, we do not want a union that tells us and our injured siblings that our “identities” should be “left at the door.” We want a union that defends us, and vindicates our rights.

We want a union that understands the connection between the fight for a better life for its members – for better salaries and benefits, for robust health care, and for a secure and dignified retirement – and the struggle against the wealthy oligarchs that are now controlling our nation’s wealth, impoverishing working people, and threatening our democracy. We want a union that is not afraid to name and oppose a Musk, a Bezos, a Zuckerberg, a Pichai, and a Thiel, when they set out to eliminate the ability of government to promote the common good, when they plunder the resources we provide to government, and when they eviscerate the public square where citizens can freely exchange ideas and views.

And we want a union that has democracy as its creed, understanding that is the lifeblood of unionism, of a free civil society, of a thriving public education, and of all our rights and freedoms as citizens. We do not want a union that seeks unity with the enemies of democracy in the name of being “above politics,” but a union that defends democracy against its enemies, foreign and domestic.

The UFT is not perfect; no democratic institution is. We have not always realized our vision of ‘total person’ unionism, and I am sure that one set of responses to this post will be to recite chapter and verse – some real, more imagined – where we have fallen short. But ‘total person’ unionism has always been our North Star, guiding our work and illuminating the path forward. It would be a tragedy if we lost sight of that North Star.

Let me close on a personal note. For many years, I broke bread and shared comradery with leaders of ABC. In different settings, they told me that my passion for a ‘total person’ unionism, for democracy, for human rights, and – yes – for social justice, was also their passion. I considered a number of them to be my friends. To say that I have been disappointed by their campaign of fear around retiree pensions, and by their adoption of a version of ‘unionism’ that seeks to evade the greatest challenge that our union, our rights, and our democracy has ever faced, would be an understatement.

But there is much more at stake here than my personal disappointment. This coming UFT election will determine whether we have a real union, capable and willing of fighting on our behalf in the difficult days ahead, or not. That choice is yours.

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[i] In fact, Pizzitola’s vision of business unionism is considerably more restrictive than the unionism of Samuel Gompers, who famously said: “What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures…”