The article reports on SEIU's success in lobbying for the passage of the so-called "Wal-Mart law" in Maryland, which will require employers the size of Wal-Mart (for now, pretty much W-M) to cover a far greater percentage of its workers' health insurance, rather than roll them over to Medicaid, as they do now. Similar laws are now working their way through the legislative pipeline in a bunch of other states.
The thinking of people like Stern is that such laws will make the costs (rising as they always are) increasingly annoying for employers like W-M, and that in what may be one of the strangest cases of bedfellowism ever, they will lobby for national health insurance out of economic self-interest. Effective union organizing in workplaces owned by large employers, coupled with actions like the two transport strikes in Philly and NYC (both over health and pensions), I think will prove far more consequential than unions' rhetorical support for what seems like a pretty quixotic bill. (It's been languishing in the House for years, notwithstanding some occassional semi-traction.)
In the past, unions generally didn't support government-provisioned care (universal or otherwise) because they effectively bargained and doing so was a good way of ensuring workers' loyalty to the union. That's obviously not the case any more, and with benefit rollbacks or wage cuts in exchange for better health benefits (a really undesirable tradeoff), they may be coming around with SEIU taking such a position.
On 7/4/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
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> Union Support for HR 676 National Single Payer Health Care is Growing
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> More unions are joining the push for national single payer health
> care by endorsing HR 676, Congressman John Conyers' national health
> insurance act. The list of HR 676 endorsers includes two state AFL-
> CIO Federations (KY and PA), 28 Central Labor Councils, and 3 Area
> Labor Federations among the 154 union supporters. The full list and
> a sample resolution are available from nursenpo at aol.com.
>
> Kay Tillow
> All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care--HR 676
> c/o Nurses Professional Organization
> 1169 Eastern Parkway #2218
> Louisville, KY 40217
> 502 636 1551
> nursenpo at aol.com
>
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> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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