Understanding UFT COPE and Union Political Action
And Why Attacks on Them Serve Only the Interests of the Elite
In the wake of the decision of the UFT’s Delegate Assembly to endorse Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City, there has been an effort to encourage dissenting members to end their voluntary contributions to the union’s COPE fund, which supports the union’s political action in election campaigning and in lobbying government.
As part of this effort, there is a great deal of misinformation and disinformation being circulated. Here is what you need to know why such an effort is fundamentally anti-union and anti-educator.
Why COPE
There is one reason – and one reason only – why there are separate union dues and COPE contributions. In the mid-20th century, the corporate and business elite successfully pushed for national legislation and government regulations which restricted what unions could spend from their general budget on political action. If political action was dependent on a levy which union members would have to pay in addition to their dues, and if it was voluntary, these elite forces reasoned, then the resources available to unions for political action would be lessened. It is up to the rank-and-file members of unions like the UFT to prove them wrong by contributing to COPE.
Those with wealth and economic power understand well that political action is an essential vehicle for how a union advances the interests of its members. For a public sector union like the UFT, where the government is also the employer and matters such as pensions are legislatively determined, this is especially the case. A number of years ago, I wrote an essay on how teacher unions provide their members with collective voice – the ability to change the conditions in their workplace and their community for the better. To describe a teacher union’s work on behalf of the common good of its members, I used the imagery of a three legged stool, with collective bargaining, political action, and professional development as the three legs.[i] Without robust political action, a union is left with only two legs, and the stool is crippled: the union’s ability to provide collective voice for its members would be seriously undermined.
What is contributing to COPE so important? The political playing field in the U.S. is dramatically tilted toward corporations and billionaires.[ii] It has long been so – the prohibitions on the use of general union funds for political action goes back to the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 – but recent Supreme Court decisions have made it much worse. In Citizens United, SCOTUS gave billionaires and corporations the ability to engage in unregulated and unlimited election campaign spending and to do so with ‘dark money,’ untraceable to its donors. In Janus v. AFSCME, SCOTUS sought to undermine public sector unions by allowing individuals who receive the benefits of union representation in such areas as collective bargaining to opt out of paying ‘fair share’ dues for them. In effect, it recreated for union membership the same situation that already existed with political action and COPE contributions. The goal? To undermine the collective voice that unions provide for working people.
These are not abstract points of political analysis. For the last half century, a political playing field that advantages the elite has generated intense economic polarization in the U.S.: the share of the GDP going to working people in compensation has fallen 14%, while the surplus going to business has grown 34%. Today, the top 10% of the American population controls 69% of our nation’s wealth, and the top 1% of the population controls 30%. The bottom half of the American people control just 3% of the nation’s wealth.
There have been many negative social consequences of this polarization for working people: worse health outcomes and decreasing life expectancy, growing mental health and addiction issues, increased childhood poverty, declining social mobility, rising rates of divorce, and the general fraying of the social fabric of community. Having a strong union like the UFT with a robust political action program has provided us with the ability to swim against the worst of that tide, even as we have worked with other unions to reverse the general trends. Undermine COPE and the UFT’s political action, and we will be swept away by those currents.
What would be lost for our members and their daily lives, if we were without COPE? Consider what the UFT has achieved in the last year through political action supported with COPE funds: record high funding for preK-12 public education in the New York State budget, real progress in a decades-long fight to lower class size, limits on smart phones and other devices in schools, continued support for Teachers Choice, additional funding for United Community Schools, and a restoration of all funding lost in previous cuts to the Teachers Centers. And consider what are among the UFT’s current legislative priorities in Albany and at City Hall, such as the reform of Tier 6, the Respect for Paraprofessionals annual funding of $10,000, and financial support for reform efforts in PROSE schools. On top of that are the efforts to counter politically the authoritarian machinations of Trump and the MAGA Republicans in Washington DC. At the top of the union’s consideration in deciding who to endorse for every public office is who we can count on to deliver on those priorities and engage in those fights.
When a member fails to contribute to COPE, they are not doing their part to support our union’s work to win these goals, but leaving it up to their union siblings. It’s freeloading, and it undermines our collective action on behalf of our common good.
Solidarity, Democracy, and Political Action
Unions are based on the central idea of solidarity. It was disturbing to read, among the calls by leading members of ABC that UFTers should end their contributions to COPE and instead send their money to Marianne Pizzitola’s business (with Amy Arundell’s explicit approval as “well said”), the suggestion that those members who were in Tier 4 shouldn’t really care about Tier 6, because it didn’t impact them directly. Is this the union we want, where we descend into a “I got mine, so screw you” mentality? One where older members abandon those who are new to our ranks? Or do we believe in the union adage that “an injury to one is an injury to all?”
Despite the campaign of misrepresentation and distortion by ABC to impugn the UFT Delegate Assembly’s mayoral endorsement, the vote took place two full weeks after Mamdani won the primary – two weeks in which there was robust debate on social media on what the union should do and two weeks in which delegates could consult with their members in schools. The vote followed a robust debate, in which all sides – including leaders of opposition caucuses – were heard. Over 1000 delegates voted, and a clear super-majority voted to endorse Mamdani.
It is noteworthy that the ABC leaders complain that this process was somehow undemocratic, but have nothing to say about the process of endorsement or the candidates endorsed by Marianne Pizzitola’s business, despite telling UFTers to send their money to it. There are no representatives democratically elected by those who send their contributions to Pizzitola’s business, which in its most recently published IRS report indicated annual revenues of over $2.5 million, virtually all in the form of donations from retiree savings. There are no meetings, no debates, and no votes over who should be endorsed. All that there is Marianne Pizzitola and a small, hand-picked board of four long-term associates – not one a UFT member – who make all the decisions.
And then there are the candidates that Pizzitola’s business endorses. For the mayoral race, it was, I wrote in a Substack on this matter, “a whiter shade of pale” – a roster made up almost entirely of white men. Four of those men – Andrew Cuomo, Whitney Tilson, Curtis Sliwa, and Jim Walden – had anti-union, anti-public education histories; three of them (all but Tilson) remain in the race for the general election. Here was my analysis:
While he was Governor, Cuomo consistently underfunded public education and health care, presided over a most problematic overhaul of teacher evaluations, and masterminded the adoption of the Tier Six pension, slashing benefits for new public employee hires. One would think that even with the single issue focus on retiree issues that Pizzitola espouses, she would have found Cuomo’s role in establishing Tier Six to be unacceptable, but apparently not. And if Tier Six was not disqualifying, what about the fact that Cuomo’s campaign website is completely silent on the question of Medicare Advantage, her signature issue?
Another revealing figure that won Pizzitola’s endorsement was Whitney Tilson, a former Wall Street hedge fund manager. (His firm was closed down in 2017, after underperforming the S&P 500 for several years.) Tilson was a founder of Teach for America, sat on the board of KIPP charter schools, and had been an active supporter of Joel Klein’s ‘Children First’ reforms in New York City public schools. In the last mayoral debate, he overtly attacked the legislative mandate to lower class sizes in New York City public schools. Like Cuomo, Tilson had taken positions that would seem to be unquestionably disqualifying for retirees. At no less than Pizzitola’s own April forum for mayoral candidates, Tilson told the assembled that he would be “the skunk at the garden party,” and proceeded to explicitly refuse to take Medicare Advantage “off the table.” And yet there he is, front and center, on Pizzitola’s endorsement page.
If you are a white man of wealth and fame, willing to kiss the don’s ring, it seems that issues like Tier Six and Medicare Advantage are not that important after all.
Note that unlike Cuomo and Tilson, Mamdani has publicly opposed Medicare Advantage, but since he was unwilling to join in Pizzitola’s attacks on the UFT and AFSCME’s DC 37, she has attacked him in the most vociferous ways.
A similar pattern emerged in Pizzitola’s City Council endorsements. I wrote:
Worse, Pizzitola has endorsed and forged alliances with elected officials from the extreme right which represent the worst in New York City politics. One such person is Vicki Paladino, the City Councilperson for the 19th district in northeast Queens and the most outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and MAGA in NYC politics. When she ran for City Council in 2021, Paladino told the community publication Bayside Patch that “breaking the back of the corrupt and reprehensible teachers union” was a priority of hers, together with “ending poisonous Critical Race Theory in our schools” and “supporting charter schools and vouchers.” While on the Council, she was removed from her Committee assignment because of anti-LGBTQ remarks characterizing queer people as “sexual groomers.” Recently, Paladino demanded the deportation of mayoral candidate (and U.S. citizen) Zohran Mamdani for his political views. Whatever one thinks of Mamdani’s politics, the idea that it should be possible to have one’s political opponents deported for exercising their First Amendment rights is a fundamentally anti-American sentiment, one that we would have seen from the Ku Klux Klan in decades past. Yet Paladino won a Pizzitola endorsement.
Those are the candidates – the Cuomos, the Tilsons, and the Paladinos – that would be supported by ending one’s COPE contributions, and sending them to Pizzitola’s business instead. The choice could not be clearer.
[i] My point of departure was Albert Hirschman’s classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and Freeman’s and Medoff’s groundbreaking work, What Do Unions Do?, which applied Hirschman to unions and is worth reading. I wrote:
Let us begin with an old but profound truth, too often neglected and forgotten: Unions are organized expressions of solidarity. They exist for the purpose of furthering the interests their members hold in common, and they use the power of concerted action and collective organization to realize those interests. When unions function in this way, they provide what one might call "professional voice" for their members. By voice I mean what the economist Albert Hirschman defined in his classic text Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Hirschman argues that when faced with difficult and undesirable conditions, people have a choice between leaving for another, hopefully better situation, the "exit" option, or staying and working to change those conditions, the "voice" option. While exit is a classically economic, market reaction to untenable conditions, voice is the political response, rooted in democratic notions of participatory decision-making. At its center is the civic principle that a person has a right and an obligation to join with others to make changes for the better in their shared conditions.
Understood this way, teacher unionism has a broad purview. It involves, without question, efforts to win a decent and fair standard of living and economic security for our members, and to secure basic rights and due process in the workplace. But it also has a much broader horizon: to further teachers' common interest in teaching as a profession and a vocation and in improving the educational performance of schools.
[ii] See Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers into Lobbyists, “How Employers Recruit Their Workers into Politics,” and “American Employers as Political Machines.”