>>On the UAW and national health care. Well, the union
>>even those guys at Solidarity House, are saying they
>>are favor of a national plan.
>
>Saying you're in favor of it and launching a serious political
>campaign to promote it are two different things. I can't shake the
>suspicion that unions don't want to get serious about this because it
>would remove a selling point for union jobs.
>
>Doug
I haven't ever gotten a union official to say that this is what's going on, and I've asked a few sharp-eyed ones who I thought might have this same criticism. However, that seems to be the deal most U.S. unions struck in the post-war period, if Jennifer Klein and Marie Gottschalk, for example, are right about the history, with red-baiting and red-scaring being the wedge employers used.
But there are some interesting reversals now that labor has become weakened and health insurance cos. emboldened. A friend who's an officer in IBEW here says that for building trades and others, where the union is actually administering the health insurance, the wrath of the members is often turned against the union itself for health insurance shortcomings. He says it now takes up most of the union leadership's time.
For unions trying to extract employer insurance guarantees, health insurance takes up your energy at the bargaining table--it becomes an excuse to not give raises and a distractor from anything else you might want to bargain on. The membership feels like they're being ripped off (because they are) but the employer can point to a third party doing the ripping. The perception that the union is winning you health care is reduced, even though it's still true that without a union you would likely pay much more and get much less.
>From the standpoint of workers in general, it is of course crazy and stupid
to trade the interests of union workers against the working class as a whole,
but it could at least work for the unionized few when that few were more
numerous. Now it's 'you're lucky to have any health insurance at all' so shut up
and sit down.
What I have heard from some union officials who don't support detaching health insurance from employment is that they're afraid that if there is no demand for employers to pay, the burden will fall more heavily on workers (for example, through regressive taxes). Still, a tax-funded system would cost about two-thirds what we're paying now, in aggregate, unless it's administered by Halliburton.
SEIU has been nibbling around the edges of calling for a national health system, but it's still mixed in with all kinds of smaller demands around health care which seem to take precedence in their organizing. Stern now seems to be now calling for de-linking health insurance and employment, but it's not at all clear that he would favor elimination of insurance companies. The AFL-CIO has a few mealy-mouthed resolutions, the closest I've seen is they say something like 'ultimately the only solution is a universal system.'
Jenny Brown Alachua County Labor Party