Under My Thumb: UFT Head Keeps a Lid on Retirees’ Push for Intro. 1096
Despite Mayor Adams abandoning the Medicare Advantage push—at least for now—DC37 Executive Director Henry Garrido and UFT President Michael Mulgrew continue to oppose the bill protecting the Medicare benefits retirees earned on the job. New York City municipal retirees are seen here rallying outside the offices of District Council 37 this past December in support of Intro. 1096—legislation sponsored by Council Member Chris Marte.
By Steve Wishnia
More than a year after United Federation of Teachers members angry about being switched into profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan unseated the union’s dominant Unity caucus from leading its retirees chapter—the chapter’s ability to advocate for preserving their traditional Medicare has been tightly-restricted.
President Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership have backed away from wanting for-profit Medicare Advantage plans to be the only premium-free health-care option for retirees—but the union continues to oppose Intro 1096, a bill in the City Council that would require the city to keep offering retired city workers a premium-free combination of Medicare and supplemental insurance to cover the 20% of bills Medicare doesn’t pay.
“As a chapter, we support 1096,” retiree chapter President Bennett Fischer, elected in June 2024 on the Retiree Advocate slate, tells Work-Bites. The chapter passed a resolution backing the bill, but the UFT legal department, he explains, told him he could not use any union platform, such as the chapter’s UFT.org email address, to support a position that’s not the union’s official stance, such as providing information about how to lobby Councilmembers for 1096.
“Everything I write on official union email is vetted,” Fischer says, including review by Mulgrew’s office.
The UFT opposes the bill, a spokesperson said in a statement, “because it is illegal. It would violate the state Taylor Law and potentially interfere with labor contract negotiations. It has the potential to cause great harm to city employees rather than help them.” They did not go into details on other issues.
Mulgrew called ‘dictatorial’
Many retirees and active union members criticize Mulgrew’s leadership style as “dictatorial.” Since he won re-election as union president in May with 54% of the vote, he’s fired at least 10 union staffers, including Amy Arundell, who’d come in second with 32% of the vote, running on the ABC (A Better Contract) slate. Another dissident slate, ARISE, got 14%.
“It was a purge,” Arundell says. “They don’t want freethinkers in the UFT.” Two of the staffers fired, she says, were her close colleagues, but had not been involved in the election.
Another was Migda Rodriguez, vice chair of the union’s paraprofessionals chapter, who’d also run on the ABC slate.
Arundell was Queens borough representative until October 2023, when she was ousted after a dispute over the wording of the union’s resolution on the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, which she felt was too one-sided in favor of Israel. She was moved to what she calls a “fake job” as assistant to the president for member organizing.
She says she’s long been a target of Mulgrew’s “wrath,” going back to 2020 when she questioned his decision to have the UFT’s advice hotline outsourced to a Salesforce call center, which she says made it “very difficult to talk to knowledgeable people.” Teachers with specific school-based questions had to talk to foreign operators working from a script.
The union’s decision to switch retirees to Medicare Advantage was unilateral, Arundell adds. “He didn’t discuss this with anyone on staff,” she says. “We all found out about it through the [article in the] Chief.”
After the retirees chapter “overwhelmingly” passed the resolution endorsing Intro 1096, the normal procedure would have been to bring it to the full union’s Delegate Assembly, says Gail Lindenberg, one of the 300 retiree delegates. But Mulgrew “has arranged that it never gets heard,” she continues: He runs the meetings, and “he never calls on certain people.”
Dissidents also say that in August, when the UFT’s health committee approved the city’s recent health-care proposal for active members and retirees not yet old enough for Medicare, its members got only minimal information about what was actually in the plan.
Dissident criticisms
Opposition to Unity, however, is divided among several groups, including Retiree Advocate, ABC, New Action, the more leftist MORE, and ARISE, some of which have aligned with Unity in the past.
Several people involved in organizing against Medicare Advantage feel that Retiree Advocate leadership has not been aggressive enough. Marianne Pizzitola, whose New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees spearheaded the litigation to preserve traditional Medicare, calls it “very disappointing.”
“We were elected to preserve the rights of retirees. That’s got to be paramount,” says Arthur Goldstein, a retired high-school teacher aligned with the ABC caucus. The retiree chapter, he argues, could have filed an amicus brief in the Bentkowski case—in which the state Court of Appeals in June reversed a lower-court ruling that the city had made a “clear and unambiguous promise” to its employees that it would cover their Medicare supplemental insurance for life. (The decision sent the case back to the lower courts to determine whether any of the plaintiffs’ other claims are valid.)
Goldstein has dismissed the UFT leadership’s claims that a city law preserving retirees’ Medicare would violate the state Taylor Law and interfere with collective bargaining as “absurd.” Retirees, he wrote on Substack in June, obviously can’t violate the Taylor Law’s ban on public employees striking, and they also “have neither voice nor vote in collective bargaining.”
The new retiree leadership “struggled with the union not cooperating,” says Arundell. “They’re conflict-averse and didn’t know how to handle the UFT’s hostility to them, so they took a more conciliatory approach.”
“I’m concentrating on doing the best job I can for our chapter,” Fischer responds. That means “opposing Unity when we have to, but also working with them when we find areas of agreement.”
Fischer says that the chapter got the UFT leadership to reverse its stance on Medicare Advantage, although he feels it’s trying to neutralize opposition. They also have an open mic for questions at meetings. “We don’t control it the way Unity does,” he says.
He also contends that their winning control of the retirees chapter in last year’s election made it untenable for mayoral candidates to support Medicare Advantage. On the other hand, Pizzitola, Goldstein, and Lindenberg all criticize Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani for not endorsing Intro 1096, and not meeting with retiree groups opposed to it.
The Trump regime, Fischer notes, has just introduced a pilot program to have Medicare require prior authorization— “the worst part of Medicare Advantage”—for certain procedures in six states. Two of those six, New Jersey and Arizona, have significant numbers of UFT retirees.
Pizzitola says Intro 1096 is still crucial because it “would truly protect us” — unlike Mayor Eric Adams’s statement that he won’t implement Medicare Advantage “at this time.”
“We can’t wait forever. We’re sick,” says Lindenberg.