Mulgrew and his Unity flacks must be in mourning since he never met a co-pay he didn't like. 

Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Ed Notes blog.  

I will be taking photos and report back tomorrow with an analysis of the rift between most of the RTC leadership and Marianne, a leading cause of the current rift within the RTC chapter that just may hand back the chapter to Unity, which will be a disaster for the future of our healthcare. Mulgrew and crew is probably moaning over the fact co-pays are frozen until Jan. 1 2027. Due to my medical condition(s) - diabetes and cancer plus the usual assorted issues any 81 year old faces, I see many doctors. 

Just yesterday I left my house at 7AM to catch a ferry to 34th St (an hour and a half) and then a bus uptown to 74th St, another hour including a 15 minute walk to the Koch center, where I had blood taken (ca-ching) and a meeting with the endocrinologist nurse (more ka-ching? Next week I have 3 appointments in one day. And the co-pays come flying into my in box. 

I was told the other day that Marianne has over 10k UFT retirees in her network. My election analysis has shown that Marianne brought over 9k retiree votes to both the 2024 victory in the RTC election and in the 2025 UFT election. Those 9k votes are up for grab in next year's RTC battle between Unity and Retiree Advocate and Fix Retiree Benefits. There are some serious differences between RA and FRB, some over Marianne who some in RA don't consider kosher enough politically to support plus major resentment over her support of ABC in the election last year which brought them those 9k votes. 

There are also differences over the lack of pushback against the UFT leadership where FRB feel the RTC leadership (10 officers and 15 Exec Bd members ) has been weak in defending our healthcare, seemingly distracted by outside factors - very quick to support workers in other unions but I've seen nothing out there urging members to show up today. 

I will be taking attendance and some photos. 

• Marianne Pizzitola, President, NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees
• Jacob Gardener, Walden Haran Williams LLP
• Steve  Cohen, Pollock Cohen LLP
• New York City public service retirees
• Supporters and advocates
  
  

• Marianne Pizzitola speaking on the steps of City Hall
• Retired New York City public servants gathering in support
• Interview opportunities with retirees directly impacted by the healthcare changes

           

Monday, Aug. 3, 2026

Boy there's a lot on the plate to report and every day when I don't post, the list gets longer. This morning, NYC Retirees led by Marianne Pizzitola made a historic announcement. Another monumental win for NYC Retirees led by their president, Marianne. 

Wednesday, August 5 Rally and Press Conference  at City Hall:

There is some irony in that one of the sticking points in the (rare) negotiations between Fix Retiree Benefits and Retiree Advocate over the upcoming Retiree Chapter Election next spring is over an alliance with Marianne who has come under criticism from some ideologues over what may or may not be her personal politics, which frankly I don't give a rat's ass about since she is focused on one issue: protecting retiree benefits of all municipal workers.

Marianne appeared in NY1 last week and when asked what would be her number 1 wish, it was to end the co-pays. While she did win backpay, she also won a freeze on raising co-pays for this year. I know full well about co-pays as I have a few every week.

https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/the-rush-hour/2026/07/29/public-service-retirees-call-for-better-healthcare-protections  

 

Read more about what amounts to one of the largest class action settlements in NYC history.

           

The NYC Teachers Retirement System (TRS) contacted over 180 retired paras and advised them they “made a mistake” when their pension was calculated some more that 15 years ago.  Not only are they reducing their pension by half, they are clawing back the alleged overpayment for the last three years. ...the UFT argue that active paraprofessionals are making an unlivable wage and even declare war on the Mayor if he doesn’t sign into law the bill in the City Council to give them a $10,000 ‘respect check’ of Non-Pensionable income. Well a pension that is 2/3 of that salary is unlivable and now take more than half of that away from them when they came to rely on that money is criminal.  The UFT told these paras when they called, that there was nothing they can do.  The UFT has been silent on this issue.  TRS already cut these retirees pensions in half beginning with the July pension check.

Well, look at this one. The UFT, with its 3 TRS pension reps sits silently by and not standing up for the affected disabled paras who are undergoing pension reductions due to a mistake made by TRS in overpaying them. A group of UFT paras and retirees have joined with the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees to stand up for them.

July 31, 2026 

Good Morning,

Attached is a press statement from our three organizations.   Fix Para Pay is a slate of active and retired UFT Paraprofessionals advocating for better wages to be negotiated by their union.   Fix Retiree Benefits is a slate of active and retired UFT members advocating to protect an improve the conditions for UFT retirees.  NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees is an organization of over 200,000 municipal NYC retirees founded to protect retirees healthcare and other benefits from diminishment in retirement. 

Together, we stand with our retired paraprofessionals today.  The NYC Teachers Retirement System (TRS) contacted over 180 retired paras and advised them they “made a mistake” when their pension was calculated some more that 15 years ago.  Not only are they reducing their pension by half, they are clawing back the alleged overpayment for the last three years. 

You have watched the UFT argue that active paraprofessionals are making an unlivable wage and even declare war on the Mayor if he doesn’t sign into law the bill in the City Council to give them a $10,000 ‘respect check’ of Non-Pensionable income. Well a pension that is 2/3 of that salary is unlivable and now take more than half of that away from them when they came to rely on that money is criminal.  The UFT told these paras when they called, that there was nothing they can do.  The UFT has been silent on this issue that needs to end today.  TRS already cut these retirees pensions in half beginning with the July pension check.

We are collectively demanding that they amend the Retirement and Social Security Law they amended in 2002 under then President Randi Weingarten and correct this injustice and TRS must pass a resolution not to claw back any alleged overpayment. 

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Arthur Goldstein: 516-661-3221

Marianne Pizzitola: 631-793-9715

           

One of the (many) controversial policies of DSA is public ownership of the means of production, which causes outrage. Oh the outrage over the Mamdani plan which the right wing and even some Dems are calling "free food" when in fact it is reduced price food. I find it funny how the anti-Mamdani cabal will hang onto anything they can grab, led by the NY Post.

DSA - NY has called for a takeover of Con Ed and other public utilities. Our water and sewage systems are publicly owned and managed. How would you feel if we sold them off to private equity?

The major public entity in this country over the past 200 years has been the public school system, which of course there has been a major move to privatize, with charter schools being the spearhead, but even that is not good enough - thus vouchers. I'm surprised they haven''t moved to make all learning remote and sell off all the school buildings to turn them into condos. Boy, my old school in Williamsburg built in 1904 has high ceilings and big windows. 

In fact, we have found over the past 50 years that the reduction of public regulation, if not outright ownership, has been a disaster in this country. Think of Chicago selling off its parking meter system.

Public Control or ‘20th-Century Socialism’? U.K. Debates a Different Way.

The new prime minister, Andy Burnham, faulted Margaret Thatcher’s privatization in the 1980s. He wants an alternative economic model, especially to run utilities.

By Eshe Nelson

Reporting from London

July 28, 2026

Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, began his leadership with a full-throttled rebuke of the past 40 years of British policymaking. Rejecting the sweep of privatization introduced by Margaret Thatcher, Mr. Burnham said he would bring in a new political and economic model.

A central pillar of that approach will be more government control over utilities and services that were handed over to private companies starting in the late 1980s, like water and energy.

Mr. Burnham was ushered into office extraordinarily quickly. A little over a month ago, he was the mayor of Greater Manchester in the northwest of England, without a seat in Parliament. Now he is vowing to remake Britain, and little is known about the details of his economic agenda.

One result has been the start of a vivid debate about privatization — whether it went too far and how best to fix its failings. Mr. Burnham calls for more “public control” of services, not necessarily government ownership. But the vagueness of the term has left a lot open to interpretation and speculation. It has come to encompass everything from a socialist turn into widespread nationalization to tighter regulation of utilities.

Mr. Burnham said that later this year he would release a 10-year plan to increase public control and reduce the cost of essential services like water, housing, energy and transportation.

Mr. Burnham should create the “feeling that the state is back and it’s on our side,” said Danny Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of the New Economics Foundation, a progressive British research group. “That’s what’s been missing.”

Arguments about ownership frame the debate.

As prime minister in the 1980s, Ms. Thatcher fundamentally reshaped the British economy. Her 11-year tenure increased private homeownership, greatly enhanced the financial services industry and diminished manufacturing. Her government also privatized huge segments of the economy, including energy, telecommunications, airports and water.

The resulting companies were floated on the stock market. The idea was to bring about mass public ownership through these shares, but many companies ended up in private hands and most were delisted from stock exchanges.

The forceful opening of the British economy led to wealth creation and prosperity. It also wrought regional inequality through deindustrialization in the north and accelerated the shift to an economy more dependent on financial and business services, which were clustered in London and the southeast.

“In the 1980s, Britain took some wrong turns,” Mr. Burnham said on July 20, standing in front of No. 10 Downing Street, just moments after he became prime minister. “Political power was centralized, economic power privatized, large parts of the country deindustrialized, and they still haven’t recovered.”

But is ownership really what makes the difference in how well a utility or service, like trains, is run? Economists and policy strategists aren’t decided either way.

Mathew Lawrence, the founder of Common Wealth, a British think tank, who has presented his ideas to Mr. Burnham’s team, is in favor of some public ownership.

“Public ownership and public provision are not panaceas, they are tools,” he said, and shouldn’t been seen as “magic wands that fix everything.”

But previous periods of nationalization, such as after World War II, had notable successes, including the building of more public housing and the transformation of the energy system from an inefficient patchwork of thousands of companies into a few centralized and regional systems.

Ownership is important because it enables profits to be returned to the government, Mr. Lawrence added, and then a choice can be made about how to spend them in the public interest.

Others are less convinced. Diane Coyle, a professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge, said that how services were regulated and the sectors were organized to create competition mattered more than if they were run by private firms or public agencies.

There’s a strong argument, she said, for a system where state-owned companies compete with private enterprises. That way, public ownership can lead to diversity in business models, more competition and more informed oversight.

“People obsess too much about ownership,” said Ms. Coyle, who has influenced policymaking in Manchester and at the national level. “It isn’t the ownership, it’s the structure of the market that makes a difference in the kind of outcomes for consumers and citizens.”

Some government takeover is already happening.

More nationalization is already underway in Britain. On several occasions it has been an act of last resort.

Under the previous prime minister, Keir Starmer, the government had started to bring the railway system under full public ownership and was pulling more than a dozen train operators into one public company, Great British Railways. Several operators were already nationalized by the previous Conservative government for financial or operational failings.

One of Mr. Starmer’s last acts as prime minister was to complete the nationalization of British Steel, which operates the country’s last blast furnaces for making steel. It seized control of the company last year after its Chinese owner, Jingye, appeared to be trying to shut down operations.

Water companies could be next. In the late 1980s, Britain went further than almost anywhere else in the world when it privatized the water authorities of England and Wales, selling off assets such as pipes, land and reservoirs. After decades of private ownership, much of the county is fed up with rising bills, pollution and chronic underinvestment that followed a period when billions of pounds were paid out in dividends. A few years ago, every major water and wastewater company was under investigation for dispensing sewage in rivers and other waterways.

The poster child of the failure is Thames Water, the country’s largest water company. Weighed down by enormous debts, it has been on the brink of financial collapse for years and faces the possibility it will be temporarily nationalized. It currently has only enough cash to last until the end of the year. Last month, the government rejected a rescue plan by Thames Water creditors, which include the large American funds Apollo Global Management and Elliott Management. Mr. Burnham will need to decide what to do about Thames Water.

For some, it could be a test case for the rest of the industry. GMB Union, one of Britain’s largest labor organizations, has called on Mr. Burnham to “take decisive action and nationalize Thames Water.”

Public ownership is about politics, not just economics.

It’s one thing for the government to prop up operators of essential utilities offering substandard services or in financial distress. It’s another entirely to bring companies and services into public ownership on the argument that it’s a superior model.

For some services, the public has taken a side. More than 80 percent of Britons believe water companies should be run in the public sector, and 70 percent say the same for energy, according to recent polling.

Still, widespread nationalization of services is unlikely.

Mr. Burnham said he wanted to be a “business-friendly” leader. His method of public control is likely to be influenced by changes he made to the bus system in Manchester, where a franchise model allows a local authority to set the routes, fares and other conditions, while private companies bid on contracts to operate the service. And so, in his 10-year plan, private companies are expected to play an important role.

“The state has withdrawn too far on the basic essentials,” said Mr. Sriskandarajah of the New Economics Foundation. “But its re-entry doesn’t need to be 20th-century socialism.”

 

           

On public sector workforce, a D.

Now, let’s be fair to Mamdani. He has to live within his budget. If he chose to shower public workers with money, then that’s money that can’t be spent on reducing class sizes, or building playgrounds, or subsidizing affordable housing. Even after we have real socialism, those tensions will continue to exist.

But what I hoped Mamdani would do is to quickly fix outstanding inequities. The gross underpay of Paras. The gross underpay of Emergency Medical Techs. I want him to put his thumb on the scale for job security for CUNY Adjuncts.

I wanted – and want – him to tell the Office of Labor Relations (OLR) – where he reappointed the same commissioner who’s been in that office since Bloomberg (ugh) – that her job is to fix problems, not stonewall. I want him to tell agency commissioners that part of “efficiency” is mandatory discussions with workplace-level union reps. That they will be graded and assessed on their ability to reach mutually agreeable solutions to problems – worker problems as well as agency ones.

Instead, the City’s labor relations seem like business as usual. I was not wholly dismayed when he answered my question in April about collaborative bargaining by saying ‘I need to talk to my people about that.’ That’s was not an illegitimate answer, although a socialist should have labor questions at the top of their list of issues to address. But who did he talk to - the same OLR that is the problem? 

Mulgrew is a center/right Democrat, as is Weingarten and the entire UFT/AFT apparatus, despite some progressive rhetoric and Randi's resignation from the DNC - a purely "finger in the air" move. A leader of the DNC lives in my building and rolled his eyes when Randi's move came up and called her a political opportunist - she should wear a sign.

Marc cites Daniel Alicea's EONYC: 

As explained and itemized in this article by Educators of New York City, in the most recent contract round, Mulgrew made various concessions that gave him $450 million to allocate as he saw fit, above and beyond the “pattern” raise that all city workers received. Mulgrew could have allocated it to increase Para salaries. Instead, he used most of that money to give an additional $1000 to each member. I think this EoNYC image really sums up the UFT’s “Teacher’s first” decision: 

Daniel has been doing yeoman work on the para issue: 

 July 11, 2026

The Newly Revised UFT Para Bill: The Promise That Kept Shrinking: How the UFT sold a permanent para pay index that would seek to offset pattern bargaining—and ended up with a temporary one-year payment. And only if it passes or survives legal challenges at all.

Followed on July 19 with:

The Respect Check Passes: A Temporary Victory Built By Pressure - And the Unfinished Fight: How rank-and-file pressure pushed paraprofessional pay from a union fight to a City Hall vote—and why the legislation remains temporary, non-pensionable and legally unsettled.

And he followed up with Part 2

For roughly sixteen years under Michael Mulgrew’s leadership, there was no fundamental effort to restructure paraprofessional salaries. Aside from modest improvements to longevity raises in the 2018 contract, paraprofessional pay remained largely governed by the same pattern bargaining that had left many struggling to survive.

Then came the last contract.

The UFT had roughly $450 million in recurring, non-pensionable retention money available.

The Good, Bad and Ugly - The NYC Para Bill: A deep dive into the UFT and City Council's $10k pay plan for paraprofessionals.

BTY - listen to Daniel's interview with para Alyson Monzon in his Talk Out of School WBAI program: https://wbai.org/archive/program/episode/?id=66311

Alyson's substack: 

Why I’m speaking up for us!