[lbo-talk] how to work for Wal-Mart

Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
Fri Mar 17 12:39:28 PST 2006



> Nathan wrote:
> > How do the single payer folks on this list expect to win? That's
> > what I'm
> > not hearing. Zero strategy, zero power analysis.

Nathan, to say this kind of thing is an indication that you'ver never read Yoshie's contributions to lbo-talk.

On 3/17/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> The Wal-Mart fair share campaign doesn't make any effort to link its
> demand with single-payer health care. Far from it, it's pitched as a
> way to reinforce the idea of employment-based health care, even while
> it is being phased out of practice by corporations and governments.
> If you win at Wal-Mart but lose at GM, municipal governments,
> Medicaid, etc., the overall health care burden on corporate America
> will decline. Talk about zero strategy and zero power analysis.
>
> Moreover, mandating high-turn-over employers like Wal-Mart to devote
> a slightly higher proportion of labor costs to health care -- which
> will buy crappier coverage at ever higher costs as time goes by --
> hardly benefits even Wal-Mart employees.
>
> The question is whether rank-and-file workers can push unions like
> the UAW -- i.e., unions that have resources but are plagued by
> employer demands for constant concessions -- to develop a campaign
> for single-payer health care or the push will have to come from
> forces that have much less resources than they.
-- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles



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