by Marie Gottschalk
....In the first two parts of this paper I analyze the early history of the employer-mandate idea, focussing first on its origins in the Nixon years, and then on how and why labor came to embrace this policy prescription after abandoning its commitment to national health insurance.
It is suggested that organized labor initially endorsed the employer mandate because it appeared to be the politically expedient solution in the 1977-78 period as key Democrats, notably President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Ma.), cooled to the idea of national health insurance, as traditionally understood, and began searching for alternatives.
By compromising, labor hoped to expand the ranks of its supporters. Not only did this result not follow, but by embracing the employer-mandate idea, organized labor ended up embracing a highly selective understanding of the U.S. political economy, one that was generally uncritical of the role of corporations in the restructuring of the U.S. economy and that was ultimately quite at odds with the case labor was trying to make in other policy areas, notably in the 1993 battle over the North American Free-Trade Agreement (N.A.F.T.A.).
As we will see, this had important political consequences for the political efficacy of organized labor, not only in the struggle over health care in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but in other policy realms as well....
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