An Open Letter to the United States Congress
By Frank J. Spotorno
There is a quiet crisis unfolding in our neighborhoods. It does not make the nightly news. It does not trend. But you can hear it at the kitchen tables where retired seniors choose between property taxes and prescriptions. You can see it in the eyes of a 45-year-old ironworker with a bad knee and no insurance. You can feel it on job sites where the American worker has been fighting for eighty years with one hand tied behind his back.
For too long, Washington and Albany have written policy for corporate balance sheets instead of human beings. They have favored stock buybacks over the dignity of labor and the security of the people who built this country. That era has to end.
If Congress is serious about restoring the middle class, it must act on three fronts: protect our seniors, guarantee healthcare for the working class, and unleash the full power of American labor.
1. Protect Our Seniors: Raise the Threshold, Kill the Red Tape
No senior citizen who spent forty years on a roof, a scaffold, or a factory floor should have to decide whether to pay the Town of Hempstead, buy groceries, or fill a heart medication. Yet that is the choice thousands of New Yorkers face every month.
Programs like SCHE and Enhanced STAR exist on paper. In practice, their income thresholds are relics. They have not kept pace with inflation, property values, or the simple cost of living in a state where a gallon of milk flirts with five dollars. The result is a cruel joke: the very people these programs were designed to help cannot qualify for them.
We need two fixes, and we need them now. First, dramatically raise the property tax relief thresholds so that a retired union carpenter or a widow on Social Security can actually use the benefit. Second, burn the mountain of paperwork. Seniors should not have to hire a notary, a lawyer, and a translator to prove they are old and own a home. If we can wire billions to failing banks at the push of a button, we can automate a tax exemption to keep a grandmother in her house. Dignity should not require a filing deadline.
2. Healthcare for Working People: A Safety Net Between 18 and 64
In the building trades, we bargain. We fight for healthcare at the table because no one else will hand it to us. That is the union difference. But millions of Americans do not have a union hall. They have a job, a boss, and a health plan that disappears the day they get laid off or get sick.
A worker’s health is not a fringe benefit. It is a human right. For Americans aged 18 to 64 who lack union representation, Congress should establish a basic, universal healthcare safety net.
Think of it as a two-tier system that already works in practice. The Universal Tier guarantees every working citizen primary care, emergency services, and essential medications. No one goes bankrupt because of a broken arm. The Supplemental Tier preserves the right of unions and employers to negotiate premium plans, better benefits, and specialized coverage. We are not taking anything away. We are building a floor so that no American is one diagnosis away from the street.
The upside is obvious. Emergency rooms stop serving as the nation’s family doctor. Small businesses are no longer crushed by premiums. And a welder in Yonkers does not have to choose between a hospital bill and his rent.
3. Unleash Labor: Repeal the Handcuffs of Taft-Hartley
Since 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act has been a boot on the neck of the American labor movement. It was written to ban secondary boycotts, to let states pass so-called “right-to-work” laws, and to make sure unions spent more time in court than on the shop floor. We have been fighting with one hand tied behind our back for eighty years.
If Congress wants manufacturing back in the United States, it needs to stop punishing the people who do the manufacturing. That starts with repealing the anti-union provisions of Taft-Hartley.
We need federal law that does three things. First, ban “right-to-work” nationwide. If you take the wages, the pension, and the safety protections of a union contract, you pay your fair share. No more free riders. Second, protect local union shops and domestic manufacturing with the same urgency we protect banks and airlines. Third, mandate that public money means union labor. When a developer takes IDA tax breaks, incentives, and public dollars, the job should be 100% signatory. For decades, the building trades have endorsed politicians who took our support and then forgot our phone number. That stops now.
The Path Forward
The strength of this nation has never been in Wall Street or Washington. It is in the hands of the people who build the bridges, run the wires, pour the concrete, and take care of our parents when they are old.
Protect our seniors. Guarantee healthcare for the working class. Restore the right of unions to organize without a federal straitjacket. Do those three things, and we rebuild an economy that works for the people who work.
Congress, half-measures had their chance. They failed. The beam is bending. It is time to act.
My rule has never changed in forty years: If it doesn’t carry the union label, it doesn’t go on the job. In other words, the truck keeps moving.
Now let’s get to work.
Frank Spotorno is a Retired UBC Member, Local 2790, Member, IACRL Member, East Harlem Giglio Society and was a candidate for Congress in NY-14, in 2016.