Final week, New York Metropolis’s Democrat-dominated Metropolis Council declined to vote on a measure that will have allowed town to cost charges to metropolis retirees for well being care insurance coverage, a measure being pushed by the right-wing administration of Democratic Mayor Eric Adams and representatives of town unions on the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC).
The vote would have doubtlessly revised Administrative Code Part 12–126, beneath which the over 250,000 retired educators, firefighters, social service, sanitation and different metropolis workers have loved a premium-free plan that covers 20 % of medical prices since 1967. This system is right this moment referred to as Senior Care.
Town-MLC partnership—extra appropriately referred to as a conspiracy—proposed the invoice after failing to ascertain a plan to switch metropolis retirees to a federally funded, privately administered Medicare Benefit plan within the face of fits introduced by the New York Metropolis Group of Public Service Retirees (NYCOoPSR). The lawsuits resulted in selections in each decrease and appeals courts that required town to honor the executive code.
A change within the code by the Metropolis Council would have allowed town to impose a month-to-month price of $191 for Senior Care. Many retirees can’t afford additional insurance coverage prices after they already should select between lease, meals and drugs, particularly retirees from lower-paid occupations resembling schooling paraprofessionals.
The imposition of a premium would pressure 1000’s of retirees to modify to the Medicare Benefit plan, which might not cost a premium initially however may restrict retirees’ selection of physicians and medical procedures, together with expensive therapies for circumstances related to getting older. These options are designed to make sure a revenue to the personal firms that run Medicare Benefit plan.
The MLC desires to maneuver retirees onto Medicare Benefit to satisfy its obligation to seek out $600 million in financial savings for town in well being care in 2021 and in “each fiscal yr thereafter,” beneath a 2018 contractual settlement. That price reducing is a part of a sample the union formalized in contracts with town in 2014 and 2018 to pay for wage will increase from well being care plan financial savings, which by 2021 had already “saved” $4.5 billion in well being care prices.
The Metropolis Council, which is overwhelmingly Democratic and consists of many supporters of Mayor Adams, made a tactical retreat within the face of huge opposition to the plan. On January 9, over 200 retirees testified to the council condemning the plan, whereas tons of extra outdoors the chambers demanded to be let in. Medicare Benefit can also be broadly opposed by in-service metropolis staff.
Adams has beforehand mentioned he’ll unilaterally act to alter retirees’ well being care construction. It will undoubtedly provoke authorized motion by retirees’ organizations as soon as once more.
However this isn’t the top of the matter, and completely no confidence will be positioned within the metropolis council or the capitalist courts to guard staff’ proper to respectable well being care. The calls for for austerity are part of a political and financial program of each Democrats and Republicans. Based on the pro-business Residents Finances Fee, well being care prices will rise for town about 8.5 % within the subsequent three years. A technique or one other, the Democratic Celebration intends to implement austerity on a nationwide scale and significantly in New York Metropolis, which holds over $100 billion in debt.
Already, the Adams administration has applied cuts to schooling and initiated a hiring freeze for 1000’s of empty metropolis positions. In November, it reduce hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from the schooling price range, together with shedding over 400 early childhood educators and shutting down complete college applications. On January 12, Adams introduced one other $800 million in cuts to the Division of Training (DOE) price range for subsequent yr on high of the $375 million price range reduce remodeled the summer season. Assaults on all metropolis companies, resembling hospitals and transportation, will now go ahead.
Probably the most important facet of the cuts to well being take care of retirees is the unrelenting push by the commerce unions. It expresses the whole departure of those organizations from any try to defend the fundamental rights of their members. Probably the most vocal advocate for the modifications is the top of one of many largest metropolis unions, United Federation of Lecturers (UFT) President Michael Mulgrew.
A lot of the retirees’ ire has been understandably directed at Mulgrew’s “huge lie” ways. The UFT, for instance, emailed retirees when the invoice to amend town administrative code was launched January 4 telling them that “the proposed modification doesn’t alter any of the protections to our well being care,” when, in truth, the entire function of the modification is to dramatically downgrade retiree well being care.
Mulgrew has additionally tried to pit present staff in opposition to retirees by repeating misinformation in an October 29 letter to lively workers from the Metropolis Workplace of Labor Relations. The union warned, “If the unions don’t go together with [the Medicare Advantage plan], town has threatened to cost annual well being care premiums of roughly $1,500 [annually] for all in service municipal staff,” together with the just about $5,000 annual premium on Senior Care.
Through the pandemic, the UFT facilitated town’s delayed closure of faculties in 2020, then the unsafe reopening of faculties in 2021, after which enforced the next dismantling of mitigation measures. All of this resulted in pointless deaths and power Lengthy COVID amongst educators, college students, and their relations. It ensured the unfold of the virus all through town, with faculties one of many fundamental vectors of viral transmission. Beneath the false “residing with COVID” insurance policies concocted by the Biden administration and applied by unions nationwide, retirees had been successfully culled from the inhabitants as a class that doesn’t produce earnings for the super-rich.
The assist by Mulgrew, the UFT and the MLC for implementing Medicare Benefit, similar to their function in the course of the pandemic, is a poignant instance of the combination of the commerce unions into the capitalist state, which is in flip managed by the companies.
There will be no efficient opposition to the assaults on retiree well being care that fails to confront this alliance. The pseudo-left opposition within the unions, such because the Motion of Rank-and-File Educators caucus within the UFT politically dominated by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), maintain rallies that make calls for on those that are liable for the assaults—the Democratic Celebration and the unions.
Metropolis staff, lively and retired, should combat the Democratic Celebration, which is now centered on selling American imperialism’s conquest of Eurasia by conflict with Russia and shortly with China. Each social proper of the working class will likely be sacrificed to produce weaponry and navy help to the conflict in Ukraine.
The unions are usually not solely price range cutters however front-rank advocates of the conflict plans of the American ruling class. In October, American Federation of Lecturers President Randi Weingarten traveled to Poland and Ukraine on a conflict propaganda tour, assembly with far-right nationalists.
The pressure that may defend and lengthen the precise to well being care and a safe retirement is the working class itself. New York Metropolis has seen an rising variety of strikes within the final two years which can be a part of the nationally and globally rising class wrestle—on the Hunts Level Market, Columbia College and NYU graduate staff, part-time school at The New Faculty, Harper Collins Publishing staff and most importantly the strike of seven,000 nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiore hospitals this month. These are a part of the transformation of mass social anger right into a rising wrestle of the working class internationally, resembling in France in opposition to President Macron’s transfer to boost the minimal age for a full pension by two years.
In August 2021, New York educators, together with retirees, organized the Educators Rank-and-File Security Committee to take again the facility from the union equipment, develop a motion within the working class impartial from the two-party political construction managed by the ruling class and create a community that can unite in motion all sectors of the workforce and start from what staff want, not what the capitalists say they’ll afford.
