NEW YORK, June 27 —In a city where billionaires craft education policy behind closed doors, and the Democratic Party mayor makes dirty deals with President Donald Trump to save his own corrupt skin, the Retired Teachers Chapter (RTC) of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is putting the workers’ fight front and center, not just for educators’ pensions or perks, but in antiracist defense of our students and the entire working class. At the last two RTC meetings of the year and the last UFT Delegate Assembly, both in-service and retired educators converged to demonstrate their overwhelming desire to fight rapidly rising fascism, showing unmistakable potential for building workers’ power inside the UFT, one of the largest union locals in the U.S. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been in the thick of this significant mass struggle.
Union leadership destabilized
This past year has laid bare deep fractures within the UFT. In the union-wide election in May, Michael Mulgrew and his “Unity” Caucus—the incumbent leadership since the UFT’s early years—barely scraped by with 54 percent of the vote, their worst showing in history. Unfortunately, the opposition—with the chance to capitalize on the RTC’s overthrow of the Unity leadership in last year’s retiree chapter election (see CHALLENGE, 10/30/24)—suffered an ugly split, primarily caused by a renegade Unity faction that broke with Mulgrew and topped a new slate they dubbed A Better Contract (ABC), which stridently attacked anything but what they labeled “bread and butter” issues. A second opposition slate, the Alliance of Retired and In-Service Educators (ARISE), was composed of the union’s three opposition caucuses. Though ARISE made some attempt to address broader “social justice”/pro-student issues, they studiously avoided or minimized crucial “hot-button issues” like the Israeli genocide in Gaza or fighting racism.
PLP members actively organized throughout the campaign, mostly in the ARISE coalition, bringing our newspaper and antiracist, pro-student/pro-working-class, internationalist politics to bear at critical points. In the end, in an election poisoned by nasty infighting, the result still underscores a growing restlessness from the rank and file, retirees included.
Retirees rise up against rising fascism
But a major turning point came at the final RTC meeting of the year with the membership’s resounding passage of a resolution on the rising threat of fascism. To the surprise of some, the vote wasn’t even close (85 percent), and it sent a clear message: retirees recognize the urgency of the moment and won’t sit quietly while reactionary forces—from school boards to statehouses—attempt to erase hard-won rights.
Of course, not everyone welcomed the resolution’s clarity. A well-known retired Unity misleader attempted to strike it down—watering down some of the language without fully gutting the intent. It was an act of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, but we answered it head on, and it failed to derail the momentum.
This decisive and inspiring retiree vote came in the wake of another major, hard-fought victory at the last UFT Delegate Assembly of the year just a week before. After seven months of often intense struggle, delegates were able to push through a comprehensive resolution in defense of our immigrant students, families, and staff. Not only were we able to push it to the top of the agenda and extend the meeting to guarantee a vote, the resolution passed with an astounding 93 percent!
Small steps to a larger fight
We in PLP are fully aware that resolutions are often only token measures, but each of these carefully crafted measures deliberately includes concrete, practical steps both educators and retirees can now put into practice in the schools as well as on the streets, and has the potential to qualitatively improve our organizing efforts.
We are taking this momentum through the summer and rolling straight into the Labor Day March, where RTC members will carry signs and wear shirts that broadcast our anti-fascist, pro-worker stance without ambiguity. This isn’t nostalgia—it’s strategy. We retirees are reclaiming our power not in memory of past struggles but in continuation of them.
The RTC’s growing militancy isn’t accidental—it has been influenced by the sustained ideological engagement and organizing by our Party and its allies. While the mass movement may surge with righteoussanger, we in PLP understand that the class struggle is long-term, and our work must harness that energy toward a revolutionary horizon. We fight within the struggles of today, not as an end in themselves, but to deepen political understanding and forge leaders for the struggles of tomorrow.
We don’t romanticize retirement; we radicalize it. Our goal is to win masses of people to communism, and that requires a conscious, organized base willing to challenge capitalist decay with revolutionary communist clarity. The fight isn’t easy! But we’re not in it for symbolism or reform. We’re in it to win it.
