CSEA slams Gov. Cuomo, state legislative leaders for putting politics before people

Union leader criticizes Cuomo’s scorched earth tactics, legislators’ self-interest

ALBANY – CSEA President Danny Donohue slammed Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state legislative leadership, Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats for a politically expedient deal that trades the future retirement security of working New Yorkers for legislative redistricting lines.

“Tier 6 shoved down the throat of state legislators fixated on their own self-preservation, will be devastating to 99 percent of New Yorkers,” Donohue said. “This deal is about politicians standing with the 1 percent – the wealthiest New Yorkers – to give them a better break while telling nurses, bus drivers, teachers, secretaries, and laborers to put up and shut up.”

Last December, Cuomo pushed for a tax break for the wealthiest New Yorkers that exceeds the pensions of most working people.

There are no immediate savings from the Cuomo Tier 6 plan. Potential savings over decades will only come at the expense of working people. While hard-pressed localities will see no relief in the short term from Tier 6, they will be affected by loss of state services, downsizing and consolidation of vital facilities, along with other aid reductions and a further erosion of their middle class as workers get squeezed or have their jobs eliminated. CSEA pointed out that facts had little bearing on the governor’s agenda.

Donohue criticized the governor’s scorched earth pursuit of his political ambition for giving new meaning to the term “bully pulpit.”

“Regardless of the governor’s glib talking points, New Yorkers should understand that this deal did not result from meaningful debate and good judgment – it resulted from political expediency – and it will have harmful consequences to people and communities now and for a long time to come,” Donohue said. “No good will come from this.”

NYSUT criticizes Tier VI pension vote

NYSUT Media Relations – March 15, 2012

ALBANY, N.Y. March 15, 2012 – New York State United Teachers today expressed its deep disappointment in Gov. Andrew Cuomo and those legislators who voted to slash pension benefits for future workers.

NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi said the new Tier VI provides zero near-term savings to school districts and state and local governments, while slashing benefits for middle class working New Yorkers. New York had a better choice, he said: closing corporate loopholes to bring in billions of dollars to invest in jobs and education, while enacting new legislation to recoup from Wall Street the $100 billion in pension losses stemming from abuses that crashed the state’s economy in 2008.

“It is very simple: Those who chose this path are requiring the 99 percent to pay for the sins of the 1 percent,” Iannuzzi said. “We thank those who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with organized labor and the hard-working middle class. This was an opportunity for every legislator to stand with labor and not pander to the 1 percent who are funding the non-stop attacks on labor. Sadly, not all understood that responsibility.”

NYSUT Executive Vice President Andrew Pallotta said the clear linkage between this morning’s Tier VI vote and a plan to redraw legislative lines is a disappointing reminder of the “old Albany” many had vowed to clean up. “Make no mistake, we know this was tied to redistricting, and we’re going to ask: Who chose their own incumbency security over the next generation’s retirement security?” he added.

Pallotta thanked Sen. John Sampson and his Democratic conference, as well as the four members of the Independent Democratic Conference, for supporting working people in the Tier VI fight.

NYSUT, the state’s largest union, represents some 600,000 classroom teachers and other school employees; faculty and other professionals at the state’s community colleges, State University of New York and City University of New York, and other education and health professionals. NYSUT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association and AFL-CIO.

NYSNA slams Tier VI because it hurts working women

Latham, NY, Mar. 15, 2012 – Governor Cuomo’s bill hurts future generations of public sector working women in New York. The governor and legislators who voted for this bill must face the fact that it will have a disproportional negative impact on working women.

It will now be harder to recruit and retain quality employees in many women-dominated professions, like nursing and teaching, while more male-dominated fields get a pass.

While this may be more politically expedient for the governor, it does a great disservice to millions of New York’s working women and their families.

The terms of this bill mean that employees will contribute more of their salaries, receive less in their pensions and be forced to retire later in life.

These diminished pensions mean that these retired nurses will have a lower quality of life because they chose to work for the public good.

Women statistically live longer than men and pension cuts to female-dominated professions hurt working women and their families. With many older women now in single person households, this new plan makes permanent another disadvantage for working American women.

Our 13,000 members in the public sector – working in under-funded and frequently understaffed facilities – have physically, mentally and emotionally demanding jobs. Our patients are often very sick because they can’t afford to go to the doctor.

Whether we work in the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation, Westchester Medical Center, Erie County Medical Center or a municipal hospital like Massena General in the North Country, we are the backbone of our state’s health care system.

The governor’s bill is another attack on the quality of public services in this state – and on the dedicated career professionals who perform those services with pride and determination every day.

The governor’s plan to undercut services to New Yorkers and dismantle public services will hurt thousands of nurses and millions of New Yorkers who rely on them for care.

Shame on the governor and legislators who voted for this terrible proposal.

Statement of PEF President Ken Brynien on Passage of Tier 6

ALBANY – “Speaking today for the 54,000 members of the New York State Public Employees Federation
(PEF), we are appalled that state legislators finally broke last night and gave in to the governor’s relentless
demand for a new pension tier that will do nothing to help the state or local governments deal with their
current budget demands.

“Not one of our members today will be in this new pension tier, but they all understand how it will undermine
the high standards they work so hard to uphold throughout state service. The state has too few benefits to offer
prospective employees now, with forced furloughs, rampant short-staffing and employee morale at rockbottom
lows. This new pension tier means any new hires the state attracts must work harder and longer for a
retirement that’s significantly less secure than those of their more senior coworkers.

“We can only hope our state senators and Assembly members will buck up their courage and face down this
governor’s demands for this budget that would undermine services and protections for New Yorkers, including
services to cancer patients, New Yorkers with mental illness and developmental disabilities, and troubled
children.”

The New York State Public Employees Federation, AFL-CIO represents approximately 54,000 professional,
scientific and technical employees of New York State and other public and private employers.

Pass Martin Act Accountability Extensions

by Andrew Pallotta, Exec. VP of NYSUT and BALCONY Member

New York’s 90-year-old Martin Act, which gives the state’s Attorney General sweeping powers to prosecute financial fraud, needs to be amended to reflect modern financial reality.

It simply has not kept up with the times — i.e., the deregulation of financial services and the ensuing carnage it has caused for working New Yorkers.

As the new legislative session approaches, it’s time for our Albany lawmakers to level the playing field and pass bills that would give institutional investors the ability to recover damages caused by violations of financial regulations.

It’s the right thing to do and it will help bring accountability to Wall Street.

The bills, sponsored by Democratic Assemblyman Rory Lancman of Queens and Republican State Senator Thomas Libous of Binghamton, would allow pension funds, including the New York State and City pension funds, to hold securities professionals accountable for violating the Martin Act.

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who sponsored a similar bill while in the State Senate, and the two attorneys general before him, have done a fine job going after fraudsters.

Now it’s time to let the pension funds go after the wrongdoers as well.

As Lancman wrote in an op-ed for Bloomberg News in May, “As Congress and the federal courts impose increasingly stringent substantive and procedural limitations on holding wrongdoers in our securities markets accountable, New York urgently needs to give its investors — particularly its public and union employee pension funds — the means to bring claims of their own, to recover some of their tens of billions of dollars in losses and to identify those who caused those losses.”

We at BALCONY, the Business and Labor Coalition of New York, couldn’t agree more. We are encouraged that Lancman intends to pursue his bill, which would enable pension funds to protect their rights under the Martin Act — something Wall Street opposes ferociously.

In a positive development, New York’s Court of Appeals recently ruled that the Martin Act does not prevent investors from asserting “common law claims” against securities professionals. That’s good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

New York State’s public pension funds lost nearly $100 billion in asset value as a result of the financial meltdown over the last couple of years. The proposed legislation would protect union members and their families and ensure that our public pension money is guarded against future corporate greed.

It’s all well and good that financial scammers are going off to jail in record numbers and that some investors may recoup a fraction of their losses through the courts.

These bills — which have the support of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and City Comptroller John Liu — will not help New Yorkers go after convicted rip-off artists like Bernie Madoff, but they will help protect the pension funds from the next wave of financial hucksters.

Labor leaders call for new law to recoup pension losses caused by fraud

by Andrew Pallotta

With a proposed Tier 6 pension plan that would reduce future public retirement benefits – and a state pension system already decimated by Wall Street’s meltdown – labor leaders converged on the Capitol Monday to demand new legislation that would allow the state’s Attorney General to recoup pension losses caused by fraud.

“Reckless behavior and clear abuses erased billions of dollars in retirement funds that middle-class New Yorkers were counting on,” said NYSUT Executive Vice President Andrew Pallotta. “Now, those same workers are being asked to bear the burden of a new Draconian pension tier.”

“In this era of increased accountability and scrutiny, why are Wall Street banks getting a free pass?” Pallotta asked.

Rampant greed fueled by lax financial oversight laws played a prominent role in the Wall Street crash, labor leaders said. The collapse led to the loss of $100 billion to the state pension system – not a dollar of which has been returned.

Though the state Attorney General has broad power to prosecute securities fraud under the Martin Act, he has no standing to recover losses and damages on behalf of public pension funds. The proposed legislation pushed by labor leaders Monday would amend the Martin Act so that public-pension money can be recouped, ensuring as well that Wall Street firms that commit fraud are held accountable.

“This is not about business risk. We’re talking about fraud, negligence or theft,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. “When the golden goose lays the golden egg, Wall Street comes and grabs it, but everything else that comes out of the goose, well, they leave that for rest of us.”

Mulgrew said Wall Street “gambled with other people’s money and lost.”

“If I were a Wall Street billionaire, I’d love the idea of having somebody else pay for my mistakes,” he said, incredulously. “We need Martin Act reform to help make sure that firms that engaged in reckless behavior pay for their mistakes, rather than dumping that burden on the workers.”

Brooklyn Democratic Assemblyman Peter Abbate, lead sponsor of the bill in the Legislature’s lower house, said, “It simply doesn’t make sense that the pension funds have no practical way to recover investment losses caused by greed.”

With the loss of billions in pension-system dollars, pension costs for local governments statewide have soared. As a result, budgets have been constrained, services and jobs have been cut, and costs have been passed on to taxpayers.

Pallotta said expanding the Martin Act would help local governments cope with those added financial constraints, and lessen the burden on taxpayers.

Andrew Pallotta is Executive Vice President of NYSUT and a BALCONY member.

Share
|

Posted under News from BALCONY, Pensions

Food Stamps and Fingerprints a Bad Combination

March 12th, 2012

by Robert M. Hayes

Robert M. Hayes is Co-Chair of BALCONY and Senior Vice President for Health Quality, Universal American Corp.

It is unconscionable that some 30% of New York’s eligible, working families are not signed up for food stamps, largely because they don’t want to submit to the stigmatizing process of being fingerprinted as if they were criminals.

This mindless requirement, the height of bureaucratic disentitlement, deprives families in need of basic nutrition and deprives New York of tens of millions of dollars economic activity.

In 2007, then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer eliminated the requirement in most of New York State, but it was allowed to stay on the books in New York City at the behest of the Bloomberg administration.

Several states, most notably California and Texas (yes, even Texas), have dropped the requirement, leaving New York City and Arizona as the only places that still force applicants to be fingerprinted. Other jurisdictions match applicants’ names with Social Security numbers to prevent or detect fraud – a process that is less costly and less dehumanizing and equally effective.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and many other state and local lawmakers think it’s high time to end fingerprinting. We at the Business and Labor Coalition of New York (BALCONY) agree whole heartedly.

Food stamps help feed the needy, ranging from single adults to large, impoverished families, cutting across all racial and ethnic lines.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says about 46 million Americans in 18.4 million families are enrolled in food stamp programs nationwide. Almost half (48%) of all Americans who receive food stamps are children. Another 8% are elderly, about 20% are disabled and 41% live in a household with earnings from a job — the so-called working poor.

The New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance says some 3 million people across the state get food stamps — 1.8 million people alone in New York City.

A 2009 study showed that 46% of all children in the Bronx received food stamps, 35% of all children in Brooklyn; 24% of all kids in Manhattan; 21% in Queens and 19% in Staten Island.

There’s no telling how many thousands of children in New York City go to bed hungry because their parents don’t want to submit to fingerprinting.

In his recent State of the State Address, Governor Cuomo declared that fingerprinting discourages eligible people from applying for the assistance they so desperately need and are entitled to.

“Stop fingerprinting for families with children for food,” Cuomo said. “Don’t make a child go to bed hungry because your government wants to come up with a fraud program that requires fingerprinting.”

His position makes sense.

Mayor Bloomberg’s does not. The mayor contends that fingerprinting is not stigmatizing and that it is an effective tool to combat fraud. On this, the Mayor is out-of-touch, losing sight of his admirable reliance on evidence-based public policy and humanitarian respect for human dignity.

The city’s Human Resources Commissioner, Robert Doar, said fingerprints helps the city find nearly 2,000 duplication errors each year, saving taxpayers $5 million.
But, as the New York Times noted, “He could not say how many are due to fraud and how many to administrative errors.”

Neither Doar nor the mayor can cite a single fraud prosecution involving food stamps.

No one condones fraud and it should be rooted out – and prosecuted where appropriate – but not one single man, woman or child should go hungry in New York City because City Hall insists on an outdated, invasive practice with a dubious success rate.

Requiring applicants for food stamps to be fingerprinted is wrong. This Mayor should not go to bed bearing responsibility for any New York children going to bed hungry.

Share
|

Posted under News from BALCONY

New York State Needs a Health Insurance Exchange

March 8th, 2012

by Catherine Abate, Non-Profit Co-Chair of the Business and Labor Coalition of New York. She serves as President/CEO of the Community Healthcare Network.

In my career as a New York State Senator, Commissioner of the New York City Departments of Correction and Probation, and CEO of the Community Healthcare Network, I have learned that when an opportunity presents itself you must grab it.

New York now has the opportunity to establish a Health Insurance Exchange that would allow people to obtain quality health care at competitive prices — and our lawmakers in Albany must seize upon it.

Several states, including California, Vermont and Maryland have begun moving forward on this but, here in New York, we have been slow getting off the mark despite Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s call for a Health Insurance Exchange. Failing to establish a Health Insurance Exchange would jeopardize New York’s ability to get upward of a hundred million dollars in Federal funding which would essentially finance the Exchange.

The American Cancer Society estimates that at least one million New Yorkers would get health insurance under the exchange which would set up individual/family and small business programs to enroll qualified applicants in medical and dental plans effective Jan. 1, 2014. Fewer and fewer small business are offering coverage today. A survey by the Business and Labor Coalition of New York (BALCONY) found that 80% of small business owners in New York said they would offer health insurance coverage to their workers if they could.

Last June, Cuomo proposed an executive bill to establish a Health Exchange to bring New York into compliance with President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which Congress approved in 2010.

Gov. Cuomo’s bill would create a public authority overseen by an appointed nine-member board. That board would administer the exchange, adopt a standardized format for presenting health options, develop policy proposals and inform and enroll New Yorkers into public or private options.

Cuomo urged the Assembly and Senate to pass the bill, calling it a “dynamic and flexible proposal that will protect consumers and help bring down the cost of health care for families, businesses and taxpayers.” We at the Business and Labor Coalition of New York (BALCONY) couldn’t agree more.

Unfortunately, the Legislature did not heed the call. Much to the Governor’s credit, he included the Exchange legislation in his new Executive Budget and the Legislature would do well to pass it without too much tinkering.

There are indeed many complex health policy, insurance and financial issues that still need to be worked out in consultation with stakeholders, including consumers and providers.

There is a great need to give consumers more control over their health care, with more quality choices offering affordable coverage. The Exchange must have the authority to act independently – putting consumer interests above all others. Insurance rules must be comparable for plans inside and outside the exchange, so outside plans cannot “cherry pick” the healthiest individuals. There must be transparency, high standards, strong anti-conflict measures (supported by an analysis by Health Care for All New York), and an administering authority with the power to make sure everything is done above-board.

Health Care is one of the most important issues in America today. We in New York cannot afford to keep dragging our feet on this issue. We have the opportunity to create an Exchange and increase access to affordable and quality health care right now. We must grab it.

As seen in the New York Times Digest, March 8, 2012, page 3: NYTDigest

Share
|

Posted under Health Care, News from BALCONY

NY Times Digest Alan Lubin Article: PUT TIER VI PENSION PLAN ON THE BACK BURNER!

March 7th, 2012

New York’s lawmakers are facing tough decisions as they grapple with trying to rein in costs and reduce the state’s ever-growing budget, but agreeing to impose yet another plan to slash pensions for public employees would be a terrible — and unfair – idea.

Public pensions have become the whipping boy of governors and mayors across the country, even though the average pension of the New York State and Local Retirement System is just $19,000 a year, hardly an excessive amount, and even though our state pension systems continue to be among the best-managed in the country.

Alan Lubin is Co-Chair of the Business and Labor Coalition of New York.

Complete article on Page 3: Tier VI Pension

Posted under News from BALCONY, Pensions

NYS ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN ON THE MORTGAGE CRISIS

March 2nd, 2012

NYS ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN ON THE MORTGAGE CRISIS

MODERATED BY FORMER NYS GOVERNOR DAVID PATERSON

March 7, 2012 7 P.M.

Macaulay/CUNY Honors College

35 West 67th Street at Columbus Avenue

We’re less than a week away! Don’t miss the opportunity to hear from a state and national leader on an issue of global importance affecting our economic recovery.

Next Wednesday, March 7, DL21C in conjunction with BALCONY invites you to a special event with NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, discussing the mortgage crisis, New York’s recent $136 million settlement with the banks over foreclosure abuses, and his appointment by President Obama to head a new joint state-federal investigation into financial misconduct in the mortgage industry. This event is many months in the making, and has particular significance for our generation of New Yorkers, as well as for anyone who has purchased a home in recent years or wants to know about the root causes of the economic collapse and what is being done to hold banks accountable.

We are thrilled to announce that former Governor David Paterson of New York State, who served in the State Senate with the Attorney General and is currently host of the Governor David Paterson Show on WOR radio, will participate as moderator for this event.

Space is limited for this event so RSVP today to guarantee admission. See you next Wednesday!

A discussion with New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman

Holding Financial Institutions Accountable and Bringing Justice For New York Homeowners

About the Event

A leading voice standing up for justice on behalf of victims of the mortgage crisis, Attorney General Schneiderman recently secured a $136 million settlement with the banks over foreclosure abuses, and was tapped by President Obama to head a joint state-federal investigation to hold accountable those responsible for the misconduct that led to the economic collapse. “The American people deserve nothing less than a thorough investigation into the global financial meltdown to ensure nothing like it ever happens again,” said AG Schneiderman.

RSVP HERE

through  DL21C at

dl21c@dl21c.org

Free for Annual Members; $5/non-members

Reception to follow

Annual Membership to DL21C provides unlimited access to all events for a full year. To purchase or renew your membership, click here!

For inquiries or more information, email us at contact: dl21c@dl21c.org.

Posted under News from BALCONY

 

« Previous Entries

Next Entries »