Mulgrew and Unity's TIER 6 BIG LIE: "We were caught by surprise in 2012 when 'Cuomo created Tier 6 in the dead of the night’."
The truth: Mulgrew and his Unity Machine, did nothing to STOP Tier 6. They rolled over when it was proposed in 2011. And when it was finally enacted in 2012. Now, we are left to pick up the pieces.
Mulgrew’s administrative Unity caucus that has been behind many of the poor decisions and concessionary givebacks in the last couple of decades wants you to believe their TIER 6 BIG LIE.
You see, it’s really important for them to deflect how Tier 6 came to be because of its detrimental effects on an entire generation of educators who must contribute up to 6% of their salaries towards their pensions for 3 to 4 decades until they can retire at age 63 — and their negligent, passive role at the time it was proposed and passed.
No, they didn’t negotiate a deal or agree to the terms through collective bargaining. What they did was just as bad — the sin of omission.
They idly stood by as Cuomo and Bloomberg plotted for over a year to have it implemented — simply accepting it as a done deal.
The truth is: This was GOAL #1 of Cuomo and Bloomberg for nearly a year before its final passage in March of 2012. These two presented various drafts of their TIER 6 plan to the state legislature, worked out compromises with public sector unions and legislators during months-long negotiations, until the scaled-back, compromise final draft was approved one early March day in 2012 at 5:30 AM.
(If you read Unity’s blogs you get varying dates, times, melodramatic, misappropriated phrases like “created a pension reform bill in the dead of the night” and other assorted false memories trying to get us to chase their Tier 6 red herring.)
As we enter the throes of a citywide UFT election, the Unity disinformation propaganda machine has been working overtime to promote a fake narrative that seeks to shed blame saying they were somehow caught off guard with Tier 6 and that all they could do after the damage was done is to try to fix it a decade later.
This is their BIG LIE. But, we see them.
Understandably, we are exhausted as union members, but hopefully not permanently damaged by Mulgrew’s decade and a half of pension and healthcare givebacks. Even while he shamelessly grandstands claiming that we are always winning somehow.
The truth is, we are in the struggle of our lives to try to FIX Tier 6 because more than 10 years ago he and his cadre of caucus foot soldiers did nothing to STOP TIER 6.
Lost in Mulgrew’s trademark verbal acrobatics and rhetoric about trying to FIX Tier 6, along with his snail’s pace, piecemeal lobbying campaign, is the fact that he dropped the ball.
We’re here because he failed to organize us to use our collective union power to STOP the agenda to deplete our pension benefits.
We were NOT caught off guard. It wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t created one fateful night. Bloomberg and Cuomo telegraphed their Tier 6 intentions for months. It was a long time coming.
Bloomberg had asked for deep cuts to our pension and healthcare, circa 2008-2009. He stopped negotiating contracts with our city’s unions, not long after. By 2013, a hundred percent of city labor contracts expired. His anti-union agenda to cut our pensions became his ultimatum to the city’s labor unions.
Bloomberg then feverishly lobbied in Albany. He got some of what he wanted with the short-lived Tier 5 with Governor Paterson, in 2009. Then Bloomberg got it all when Cuomo acquiesced. Cuomo announced he was proposing a major pension overhaul introducing Tier 6 in his budget proposal in June of 2011.
For more than ten months before its passage, there were no organized UFT rallies in response. No large scale, coordinated lobbying campaign coming out of 52 Broadway. Not even a single UFT resolution was passed against it by the executive board or delegate assembly during the year before Tier 6 was enacted. Next to nothing in Mulgrew’s web communiques to members before — and only after the legislature passed the new pension reform.
There was no major UFT-centered action, mobilization or pushback whatsoever to STOP TIER 6 — which still threatens the financial futures of a generation of educators today and has led to a mass exodus within our profession.
You’ll find little to nothing in the mainstream press archives containing any public remarks by Mulgrew against Tier 6 prior to its passage. No prominent mentions about it on our union website during this time. Mulgrew skirted his fiduciary duties and let Dick Ianuzzi and Anthony Pallotta of NYSUT be the primary mouthpieces to speak out against the proposal while the UFT communicated little about a ‘Stop Tier 6’ fight. All while it posed an existential threat to our UFT union family.
In fact, in early 2012, when Mulgrew shared his annual January testimony to Albany’s legislature about the proposed budget, Mulgrew only dedicated a small fraction of his time to say he only had “strong reservations” about the “idea that we need a new pension tier.“
Strong reservations about the idea? That’s it?
That’s it. Mulgrew shrugged.
Unity insiders have confided, in hindsight, that they believed Mulgrew when he told them behind closed doors that the defined pension benefits were in jeopardy. They say there was a sense of inevitability about the looming draconian changes and so they maintained a business as usual posture.
Perhaps Mulgrew miscalculated that if Albany gave Bloomberg what he wanted, Bloomberg would finally negotiate contracts with the city’s unions once again? If so, the gamble failed miserably as Bloomberg left office while the city’s labor contracts, including ours, remained expired.
Even in more recent years, we’ve heard folks like UFT treasurer and TRS teacher-member Trustee, Tom Brown, continue to downplay the severity of the Tier 6 giveback, as evident in a 2022 executive board meeting where “Brown and other Unity-elected members made the argument that Tier 6 was essentially fine, better than what (the mostly non-unionized) rest of the country has, and that improvements are being made anyways.”
Brown went on to falsely claim that “Tier 6ers don’t have ‘less net compensation’ than Tier 4ers.”
After Tier 6 passed in April of 2012, Mulgrew, to his credit, refused to receive an award with Bloomberg and Cuomo at a SOMOS gala, shortly after. Maybe something about the optics of attending a party and being really, really mad?
Mulgrew and Co. would like to shift the blame and will do their best during this election season to finger point, hemming and hawing, seeking to re-assign blame, propping up false memories and scapegoating others but we all know the buck stops with the current UFT President. Full stop.
It was Mulgrew and his assigned Albany lobbyist, Carol Gerstl, at the time Tier 6 became law that handled all matters regarding state legislation. The buck stops with his failure as top leader and an inability to organize, mobilize and message.
The UFT political director at the time, Paul Egan, was assigned city affairs, City Council, elections and COPE — not Albany. We’ve seen this organizational pattern today with Mulgrew and former Cuomo operative and the UFT’s Manatt lobbyist, Cassie Prugh, who exclusively handle state legislation and state lobbying.
What must we do now?
We have little choice. We must continue to organize in our fight to Fix Tier 6.
And, we also have the power of our voices, actions and ballot. We need to vote for union leaders that will build union power, like Amy Arundell and the ABC slate, so we can effectively fight against the erosion of our pension and healthcare benefits.
We need a member-led union that educates, engages and empowers all members.
We must vote out those who have sold us out. We’ve seen how ineffective Mulgrew has been in handling the likes of Bloomberg, Cuomo and Adams. With Cuomo being the likely front-runner as the next mayor of NYC, we can’t afford to have Mulgrew leading us any longer.
We can no longer trust Mulgrew and his establishment political machine who have allowed our benefits to be gutted in timid and transactional deals. His lack of leadership has hurt us, our families, our present and our future.
It’s time for A Better Contract. Join us as we reclaim our union. Vote ABC!
