The city and state teachers unions, enraged at what they see as state lawmakers’ rollover on a new pension tier and on redistricting, are turning their backs on this weekend’s upcoming 25th anniversary Somos El Futuro spring conference in Albany.
“The elected officials who are arranging the Somos festival this year all voted on
Tier VI for the union pensions
and
voted for one of the worst redistricting plans
I’ve ever seen,”
President Michael Mulgrew told me in an interview, adding that
has pulled its financial support of the conference.
“The process that happened last week — forget about the issues themselves, the way the process played out … Done in the middle of the night, the epitome of the three men in a room, was deemed unacceptable. So right now, we are re-evaluating all of our relationships,” said an obviously ticked-off Mulgrew.
I am trying to reach
Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, the chairman of Somos
(and I’ll have more on the conference for you very shortly) on the UFT dropout, but read on…
The teachers aren’t the only workers whose union is rethinking how it deals with Albany, Mulgrew said: “It was really one of the worst examples of bad Albany politics I’ve ever seen.”
As our Ken Lovett reported Monday
, the 300,000 member CSEA pulled its campaign contributions and political endorsements out of disgust with the pension negotiations, which it and other unions have said was openly tied to the redistricting fight.
“We’re not happy – clearly we weren’t happy about a Tier VI — people being pushed by the billionaires of the
– the very people who caused the spike in the pension fund costs,” Mulgrew said, referring to the lobby group which has backed much of Cuomo’s budgetary agenda via advertising (which, of course, was countered by union-funded advertising).
Overall, he said of his dissatisfaction with the pension and redistricting process — calling the latter a “complete farce” in terms of being independent — “This was done in the middle of the night with a lot of arm-twisting. If you have a relationship with people and you work together, the least we deserve is a phone call — and we didn’t even get that.”
Suffice to say, this should make tomorrow’s lobby day, when Mulgrew and hundreds of others show up at the State Cap to lean on lawmakers, a little more interesting.