The Shadow Welfare State Re: Workers of the world...relax

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Tue Oct 1 13:01:34 PDT 2002



>Unions and the Prospects for Universal Health Care
>by Marie Gottschalk

Thanks Yoshie. I'd seen the book but not the article.


>Of importance here was the
>Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which authorized the creation of what
>became multi-billion-dollar joint union-management administered
>health, pension, and welfare trust funds.

Another of the Labor Party's planks is repeal of Taft-Hartley.

Gottschalk's book is good; we're paying a terrible price for the fringe benefits system--when red-scared unions went for job-based benefits and wage hikes rather than universal programs, it shattered us into a thousand competing fragments. Splitting effects were not just union vs. non-union, employed vs. unemployed, industry vs. industry, but also men vs. women, since job-based benefits are the family wage magnified. Not only are you dependent on your male breadwinner for the larger (or only) paycheck; your healthcare and pension are dependent on him too. Compare this to universal programs such as Social Security where the woman's access is less dependent on the male breadwinner and his wage. Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement has a book on this I worked on, focusing on universal healthcare (at http://www.redstockings.org)

Jenny Brown



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