As UFT and DC37 leadership continue to collude with the mayor to push retirees onto a CVS-ran Medicare Advantage Plan, UFT members and retirees continue to organize and fight back. 

Despite widespread, organized opposition to the city’s plan to force retirees onto Medicare Advantage, UFT leadership has consistently stymied repeated attempts to bring healthcare issues to the membership or the Delegate Assembly. Rather than allow chapter leaders and delegates to discuss healthcare, or bring it to the full membership for a vote, UFT leadership chooses to waste members’ time debating whether or not to pass resolutions celebrating the union’s birthday. Rather than facilitating a conversation about the new healthcare changes, UFT leadership’s “UNITY” caucus spends its time providing free marketing for CVS’s for-profit Aetna insurance network and making bizarre memes demonizing retirees who care about their healthcare. Meanwhile Eric Adams presses on with plans to gut retiree healthcare. And, in addition to the changes to retiree healthcare, the union is negotiating to replace active members’ GHI healthcare with something cheaper.

This has gone on long enough. MORE is supporting Educators of New York’s petition for a union-wide healthcare referendum vote. If UFT leadership can’t be bothered to involve members in decisions about their own healthcare, UFT members need to make them. We’re asking all members and supporters to sign on to this petition, which would trigger a provision in the union’s constitution to bring the issue to the entire membership of a union for one big vote. Please visit the Educators of New York website and sign the petition today!

https://hcpetition.educators.nyc/