Suspended DC 37 Retirees Association officer Neal Frumkin addresses rally outside the group’s offices in Manhattan earlier this month. Photo/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
Nope. The hearing ostensibly called to decide if AFSCME President Lee Saunders acted appropriately in taking over control of the DC 37 Retirees Association and suspending its officers in February has only sparked more questions about the contentious action and the legitimacy of the subsequent hearing process itself.
Many DC 37 Retirees Association members couldn’t even log into the Judicial Panel hearing held via Zoom on Thursday, March 14. Others who did successfully manage to get in, found themselves inexplicably kicked out. No more than 40 to 50 members were signed in during the nearly four-hour event.
The organization’s membership consists of more than 25,000 municipal retirees — and they have lots of questions about lots of things.
Neal Frumkin, suspended vice-president of Inter-Union Relations for the DC 37 Retirees Association, was forced to read former president Ed Hysyk’s statement into the record after Hysyk, a retired computer specialist with the New York City Human Resources Administration, had problems turning on his camera.
District Council 37 is part of AFSCME — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO — and is the largest public sector union in New York City. Henry Garrido is the organization’s executive director — and along with UFT President Michael Mulgrew and Municipal Labor Committee Chair Harry Nespoli — is the primary figure behind ongoing efforts to drive NYC’s 250,000 municipal retirees out of Medicare and into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance plan run by Aetna.
All this despite organized labor’s historic role in helping to establish Medicare in the United States — and AFSCME’s own calls for strengthening Medicare in the face of right wing efforts to undermine it.
Members of the DC 37 Retirees Association, meanwhile, have spent the last three years alongside other retired New York City trade unionists in effectively opposing Garrido, Mulgrew and Nespoli, and pushing back against Medicare Advantage blitz.
They insist AFSCME’s decision to put the Retirees chapter into administratorship on February 22, has everything to do with the association’s stalwart support of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees’ ongoing litigation to block the Medicare Advantage plan in NYC — and not any issues the group may have had filing their tax returns properly or losing its tax exempt status.
Members of the Retiree Association wonder why Saunders, who did not attend Thursday’s hearing himself, was able to be represented by legal counsel — while the same benefit was denied to suspended DC 37 Retirees Association officers.
Also interesting, Peter DeCarlo, the accountant responsible for preparing the DC 37 Retirees Association’s tax returns, was not among those taking part in the hearing. How, suspended DC 37 Retirees Association officers want to know, can an intelligent and informed decision about the fate of the administratorship be considered — without hearing from him?
“It’s a star chamber,” Frumkin later told Work-Bites. “The rules are set by the Queen of Hearts.”
AFSCME’s Judicial Panel is nevertheless expected to render its decision within 30 days of receiving the hearing transcript.
According to ASCME-appointed Administrator Ann Widger, the panel’s hearing “showed beyond any doubt that the administratorship was caused by serious financial negligence, putting in jeopardy the Association’s legal status and assets. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
If that’s the case, retirees also want to know why AFSCME hasn’t also come for any of its other locals currently in similar financial straits and who’ve had their tax exempt status revoked?
Widger acknowledged those revocations during Thursday’s hearing — but dismissed them as being insignificant because they are “smaller locals.”
“That’s bullshit,” New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola told Work-Bites this week. “If you're gonna enforce a rule on one person, you should enforce it on everyone.”
MORE THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO…Hmm?
Local 372 NYC Board of Education Employees certainly isn’t a small local — actually, it’s the largest local in DC 37. Shaun D. Francois I is president of both Local 372 and DC 37.
“In January, [DC 37] put out their financial report for October 31. It shows the District Council running almost $24 million in the red. Why aren't they in administrator ship?” Pizzitola says.
Local 372 is also reportedly operating in arrears and has a scholarship fund which had its own tax exempt status revoked due to a failure to submit necessary IRS forms.
“DC 37 has this scholarship fund which lost its tax exempt status because they didn’t file 990s,” Frumkin says. “Nothing has happened to them. They are presently in deficit spending, and have been for a number of years. They are spending much more than their income — and no action has been taken.”
Widger attested at Thursday’s hearing that she had regular conversations with DC 37 Retiree Association officers for a couple of years prior to the Feb. 22 takeover. But somehow, the topic of the group’s tax returns — especially coming out of the pandemic — just never came up.
According to Widger, she only learned in January that the Retirees Association had lost its tax exempt status after failing to properly file 990s with the IRS. Again, AFSCME took control of the chapter and suspended its officers the third week of February.
“The administratorship was imposed in February of this year only after the discovery in early January of financial malfeasance; and a clear lack of urgency and progress by the Association’s officers in addressing the issues (after a month’s time, little to no progress had been made),” Widger said in a statement following Thursday’s hearing. “It was clear the Association and its officers had neither the will nor the wherewithal to address these issues in a timely and effective manner.”
Frumkin, however, says there was “never a discussion that said, ‘look guys…this is a big problem…you need to straighten this out…we don't feel that you are showing enough urgency.' There was never any kind of indication that.”
Instead of being put into administratorship and suspending its officers, members of the Retirees Association also want to know why AFSCME did not simply offer to help their elderly brothers and sisters in clearing up their tax issues with the IRS.
And while AFSCME considers the emergency takeover of the DC37 Retirees Association “absolutely necessary” to protect members — the experience hasn’t prompted the union to actually rethink or reevaluate how it interacts and supports its locals.
On the contrary, AFSCME tells Work-Bites the organization already provides ample resources and supports to which all affiliates have access, and that one administratorship is not in and of itself an indication that these supports are not working.
In the meantime, Frumkin and other members of the Retirees Association have no clue when the group is supposed to next meet.
Says Frumkin, “[Widger] says, ‘Our focus is putting the Retirees Association affairs back in order, so we can continue to organize effectively for the issues they care about, including making sure the retirees have the best health care possible’ — whatever that means.”
“However,” Frumkin continues, “One of the first steps that Miss Widger took was to cancel the planned membership meeting — and not to schedule a subsequent membership meeting. By our Constitution, there are a certain number of membership meetings that must take place on an annual basis. And so, her actions, I would argue, constitute an abridgment of our Constitution.”
New York City municipal retirees fighting back against efforts to strip them of their Medicare benefits will be back in court later this week on Thursday, March 21. Those interested in attending the proceedings being held at 27 Madison Avenue are encouraged to arrive at the courthouse no later than 1:30 p.m.
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