TRENTON — From the television airwaves to the streets of Trenton, the New Jersey Education Association yesterday launched a scathing attack on a couple of unlikely opponents in its battle against a proposed overhaul of health and pension benefits for public workers. The union — the largest in the state representing nearly 200,000 teachers — released a television advertisement...
NJEA President Barbara Keshishian, center, and NJEA Executive Director Vincent Giordano during a New Jersey Senate Education Committee hearing in 2010.TRENTON — From the television airwaves to the streets of Trenton, the New Jersey Education Association yesterday launched a scathing attack on a couple of unlikely opponents in its battle against a proposed overhaul of health and pension benefits for public workers.
The union — the largest in the state representing nearly 200,000 teachers — released a television advertisement that highlighted the relationship between the bill’s architect, Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), and the South Jersey powerbroker George Norcross to try to discredit the legislation as politically tainted.
"If the legislation is approved by the committee, it will be proof positive that the interests of the party bosses are more important to this legislature than the interests of the state’s taxpayers," the president of the teachers’ union, Barbara Keshishian, said at a Trenton news conference just hours after the ad began to run.
The union, opposed to changing health benefits through legislation rather than negotiation, focused on a short provision in the 120-page bill that would bar public workers from using out-of-state hospitals unless there "is no in-state health care provider reasonably available to treat the particular condition."
A longtime political powerbroker, Norcross is the head of a health insurance brokerage with strong business ties in the state and chairman of the Cooper Health System and Cooper University Hospital in Camden.
UNION SAYS HOSPITALS WILL PROFIT
The union claims the provision was tucked into the bill to help raise profits at Cooper and other state hospitals, without regard to public workers who would prohibited from using highly regarded hospitals in New York City and Philadelphia.
Sweeney has already removed a provision that would have blocked local governments from entering the state health plan after an article published in The New York Times questioned how the measure would financially benefit Norcross, Sweeney’s longtime political patron.
In a written response, Sweeney said: "The NJEA is fiddling with our teachers’ money while Rome burns. This $1 million attack ad won’t do a thing to save the pensions of hundreds of thousands of teachers and retirees from collapse, or give property taxpayers any relief from the ever-increasing weight of health benefits that hangs around their necks."
Norcross dismissed the union’s assertion that his insurance company stood to benefit from his efforts but did not address the possible business it would bring to the hospital he heads. In a written statement, Norcross said his company, Conner-Strong, is a business that operates in all 50 states and is "not dependent on the outcome of health-care debates in any particular state."
Sweeney and Norcross, two of the state’s leading Democrats, are unusual targets of the NJEA but not the only ones.
The teachers’ union spent more than $6 million last year on advertisements attacking Gov. Chris Christie’s efforts to alter how teacher’s gain tenure and public employee benefits.
And the spending hasn’t stopped. Officials say they spent $2 million in the last six weeks on ads, including the one released yesterday.
SHIFTING COSTS TO PUBLIC WORKERS
Sweeney wants to shift more of the costs of pension and health benefits onto public workers in the form of increased contributions, along with eliminating cost of living adjustments for retirees and pushing back the retirement age from 62 to 65.
Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver (D-Essex) has scheduled a hearing on the bill Monday. Both legislative leaders face stiff opposition within their party, but only Sweeney has committed to moving the bill with largely Republic support.
Christie, who helped put together the bill but has watched silently as Democrats have fought among themselves, hopes to realize $300 million in savings by overhauling health care benefits in his $29.6 billion budget, which lawmakers have until June 30 to adopt.
The rhetoric is only likely to escalate in the coming days as the two legislative committees take their first look at the bill, beginning with the Senate Budget Committee today.
Thousands of union workers are expected to rally at the Statehouse today in an effort to block what they see as a crucial blow to collective bargaining rights in the state.
"It is party who has seem to lost its way in terms of middle-class values, working people values, " said the executive director of the NJEA, Vince Giordano. "That is the base of the Democratic Party and when they take issues of the this nature and try to out-Christie Christie on it, I think they are losing their base...I think they are making a very, very dangerous mistake."
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