*UFT Members: Call to Action* -- Sign The Petition for a Union-Wide Healthcare Referendum Vote
UFT Members for Premium Free, Quality Healthcare are demanding a voice and transparency in agreements that bring major changes to active and retiree healthcare.
Sometimes it’s just time for those we trust to do the work … to be held accountable.
UFT members have had enough with the closed door, secret negotiations that barter, give away, and diminish our healthcare benefits.
For over a decade, under the guise of “cost savings”, we’ve watched as our union leadership has failed to be transparent in bringing healthcare matters, that are collectively bargained, to our union policymaking bodies, like the Executive Board or Delegate Assembly or us, the rank and file members, for input.
Leadership, let’s be clear: We are the UFT. We are its heart. Its soul. Its engine. Its workers. Its ultimate decision makers.
And so, had leadership taken its fiduciary responsibilities towards us seriously, we would not need to demand a union referendum on this matter.
As it stands today, after seeing how our retirees lost the healthcare they were promised, and paid into, now being forcibly enrolled into a privatized Medicare Advantage plan; how Mulgrew ignored and marginalized significant opposition to his change; and as our decades-old, premium-free GHI plan, that most active city workers rely on, is about to be gutted into the bottomless abyss of “cost savings”; and as we are facing out-of-control copay hikes, diminished provider access and prescriptions seemingly wantonly denied under our current plans…
We must call for a membership-wide vote for any significant changes to active and/or retired members’ healthcare.
These include any significant changes of our healthcare carriers, limits to our choice of healthcare carriers, or institutions of or raises to premiums, deductibles or copayments, etc.
UFT members must be provided full disclosure of the wording for such proposed changes, prior to the membership wide vote.
We call on all who believe our healthcare, and the healthcare of our loved ones, is a life and death matter — that it is as valuable as a wage raise or improving our in-school working conditions — to join us in a union-wide call for a referendum to demand a direct vote and say on our healthcare benefits.
We ask you to sign the petition calling for a member-wide referendum.
We ask that you to bring this petition to other members in your local chapters and to those in your social networks.
Tell leadership: LET US VOTE.
To download, print and sign the healthcare referendum petition, and to join the fight for premium-free quality healthcare, go to: