Dr. Barry Liebowitz's Retirement

I just cane across this notice below of Dr. Barry Liebowitz's upcoming retirement.

October 28, 2013
By Neal Tepel
New York, NY, - Dr. Barry Liebowitz announced that he will step down as President of Doctors Council SEIU on December 31, 2013, the nation's oldest and largest union of attending physicians and dentists. His notable leadership of Doctors Council has spanned 33 years, one of the longest tenures of a union President in New York City, during which he helped grow the organization from a few hundred members in New York City to a national union for doctors and voice for patients.

I want to take this moment to let every NYC municipal worker know what an enormous impact this labor leader/doctor had on their pension benefits. For over seven years (1981-1988) Dr. Liebowitz and the late Don Meyers fought the city in the NYS courts to stop the illegal exclusion of part-time workers from membership in NYCERS and their lawful pension rights.

After losing battles in the trial and the appellate courts Dr. Liebowitz finally won the war at the N.Y.S. Court of Appeals (Doctors' Council v. NYCERS, 71 N.Y. 2d 889 (1988)) with an unanimous reversal of the lower courts' decisions. I can not overstate how powerful this decision, along with subsequent 1992 Part-Time Pension Law (Chapter 749), was not only to the benefits of part-time workers but for all city workers.

It put the City of New York, the Law Department, and NYCERS on notice that it could not restrict pension benefits unless the state legislature gave them specific authority to curtail those rights granted by the legislature.

This was a case of a union defending its members, something that we don't see a lot these days. Not bad for a doctor!