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TechnoratiUAW Strike Points Up Need for Universal Health Care
The mainstream press coverage of the UAW strike in Detroit has been predictably thin. Labor reporters are scarce these days, and the business-section bias of even feature coverage of labor disputes has made our news culture reflexively anti-union and anti-worker. High-wage, high-benefit manufacturing jobs are seen as a "relic." The strike represents an "opportunity" to convert the whole auto industry to a leaner, more profitable entity in which workers are paid as little as possible and pushed as hard as possible.
A good piece in Dollars and Sense magazine provides a different perspective. The piece, an interview with Susan Helper, a professor of regional economic development at Case Western University in Ohio, discusses how American reliance on "just in time" production makes manufacturing jobs mind-numbingly dull. The work is disrespected and arduous, and, worse, the public perception is that it is not worthy of high wages and benefits. Things don't have to be that way, Helper says. Instead, workers could have more discretion and flexibility in their jobs, and more ability to make improvements. Helper is a fan of the 1980s "Total Quality Management" model embraced by Japan--an idea that involved labor-management cooperation to improve quality that some in labor found compromising. But the basic idea is sound. Instead of giving work more dignity and increasing both quality and job satisfaction, the auto industry has been pumping out cars people don't want to buy, and converting to a low-wage, low-benefit and offshore workforce.
Some more creative and humane thinking about the industry is in order.
The other big economic factor involved in the UAW strike is, of course, health care.
In an open letter to the UAW leadership three former UAW International Executive Board members express their worry that the union is going too far, without open debate among its rank-and-file membership, in considering letting the Big Three automakers out of their obligation to cover retirees' health care. Management's proposed Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association would make the union, not the automakers, the administrators of retiree health care. That represents a major shift. It comes as no surprise that health care is a huge, costly issue for employers and workers alike.
But the interesting point Paul Schrade, Warren Davis, and Jerry Tucker make in their letter is that the union and management have a better option than cutting benefits and shifting the burden onto employees.
"We do not minimize the assault UAW members and all U.S. workers have been under or the challenges our union has faced," Schrade, Davis, and Tucker write. "But we do respectfully submit that the appropriate counter-proposal to the corporate bailout" should include a demand that "the corporations become a moving force on the public policy front for the enactment of the current universal, comprehensive, single-payer healthcare legislation contained in H.R. 676, introduced by Michigan Congressman John Conyers."
Like the SEIU and Wal-Mart, the UAW and GM could push together for single-payer health care as the only real solution to the nation's health care crisis.
"That such a national health care system would serve the auto companies' self-interest and level the competitive playing field is well documented," the letter-writers add. "The companies extol the economic value of the Canadian system. Our role as a union, in behalf of our members and the community at large, is not to help them escape their responsibility to their past commitments but to help them convert those commitments to the common good. On that proposal, our members are informed, and they will stand behind you."
It is a ringing statement and a timely one. If the major Democratic Presidential candidates are truly supporters of universal health care (despite, as Dennis Kucinich has aptly pointed out, mouthing the words but failing, except in his case, to back single payer) they will rush to get on board with Schrade, Davis, and Tucker.
It's time for some leadership that envisions a healthier, better-off America: not just increasingly stratified economy and an increasingly desperate work force.
Ruth Conniff covers national politics for The Progressive and is a voice of The Progressive on many TV and radio programs.
© 2007 The Progressive
8 Comments so far
Show AllFrom discussing health care with others and watching congressional commentators quibble about income levels when writing legislation to insure children, I'm not holding my breath for the US getting national health care. The prevailing attitude seems to be: "I got mine, so why the hell should I care about you or anyone else?"
Then you see a story about a young woman who thought she was covered, until she gets a serious illness and finds out otherwise, having to claim bankruptcy. So now she cares, anyone else see how disingenuous this all is?
Corporate America and the corporate-run media have so brainwashed us that we think any taxpayer money spent on the common good is evil (better to use it to build bombs in the name of national defense).
The battle cry is: deregulate and privatize (divide and conquer?). Wake up folks! It's too late to when you get ill and discover that you are under-insured. Your deregulated health care carrier will do everything it can to weasel out of paying what it promised to pay (it does this through labeling--oh this falls under the category of such and such and so and so...didn't you read your contract? No? Pity.) Sue them? Oh, didn't you remember that the representatives you voted in put limits on their liability? You weren't paying attention? Oh my, what a shame. You lose.
I also watched the New Hampshire debate. I won't mention names. Before the dabate one journalist mentioned that it would be nice to see the differences between the cadidates.
But the "journalist" handling the debate:
1. was not very informed about the candidates' stances
2. does't know even the basics of being a journalist
or 3. for some reason wished to obscure the real differences between the candidates
I tend to believe it was number 3. I hope Tim finds a different job. Anyone of us could have done better.
Most strikes by unions in recent years have been all about health care. What has amazed me to no end is the demand by unions that their members not have a co-pay for their health insurance and that the company continues pick up the full tab for the premuims.
For almost 25 years, I have had to pay 20% of the cost of my employer based health care insurance. And I don't make nearly as much money as a union worker. It's made me both angry and sympathetic over their demands but the time has come for our country to take a step forward and join the rest of the industrialized world and have universal health care for all.
Such a thing would allow corporations in this country to remain competitive with their foreign counterparts. Health care adds an additional $1250 to the cost of a GM car. Foreign cars don't have that kind of price tag because they don't have to pay the high cost of their employees health care. The reason that so many of our large corporations are offshoring these days is to avoid having to pay health care, and that would not happen if H.R. 676, the Conyers-Kucinich health care bill would get passed.
Also, I am noticing, regarding Rep. Dennis Kucinich's run for Presidency, no mention of him is made in the mainstream media. For example, regarding the New Hampshire debates last evening, none of the reports on those debates have made one single mention of Kucinich. Not one. No mainstream media has said a word about his candidacy. Is it because he is against the war and for single payer health care? Is he too hot to handle?
If you want the US out of Iraq and if you want single payer, universal health care, then by God, support the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich for President. Don't go with some limp, spineless Democrat who proposes half measures. This is no time for half measures. The very future of our country is at stake. We're pouring untold billions down Iraq when so many people here are suffering from lack of the ability to so much as visit a doctor.
THE COST OF ONE DAY IN IRAQ=163,525 PEOPLE WITH HEALTH CARE. Think about that. One hundred sixty three thousand, five hundred and twenty five people could have access to health care for one day for what it's costing us to wage a war in Iraq for one day. If that isn't a moral balance sheet, I don't know what is.
The word to use is not "universal."
Most using are referring to forcing everyone to buy insurance. We are seeing how that is failing in Massachusetts.
The phrase to use is "single payer." And we know Hillary and all the Republicans are against it.
Get it right.
The following is from a posting by Phillip Bannowsky at Delaware Talk Back, a sort of blog for Community Advisory Board members at the Wilmington News Journal. See http://www.delawareonline.com/blogs/talkback/blog.html.
For poetic excursion into the fragmenting world of the assembly line, see www.autoplant.info.
In many ways, the United Automobile Worker's strike against GM is a crucial defense of the post WWII social contract, whereby unions could struggle for and win social progress with better standards of life for all American workers.
In other ways, unfortunately, it may only aspire to limit the damage caused by three decades of laissez-faire economics and a deteriorating for-profit health care system.
Instead of bargaining to improve wages, benefits, and job security across the board, here is what the UAW is forced to consider. GM has proposed to unload its retiree health care liabilities on the UAW in the form of a Voluntary Employee Benefits Association (VEBA), but funded at less than the full value of those liabilities, according to Global Insight (http://www.globalinsight.com/SDA/SDADetail10015.htm). While trying to limit the difference between value and funding, the UAW is pushing for some sort of job guarantee in partial compensation. The fear by some rank-and-file workers is that the union will be stuck in the middle as insurers continue to replace health care with profits.
Historically, the UAW-big three contracts have been both the emblems and the engines of economic democracy. The UAW's growth was facilitated by the progressive politics of the New Deal, and before his death in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt came out in favor of universal health care. After that, New Deal progress was stalled and eventually reversed. In 1945, Harry Truman asked Congress to enact a national insurance program "to assure the right to adequate medical care and protection from the economic fears of sickness." Unfortunately, Truman's proposal foundered on a hysterical cold-war-era red-baiting campaign. Since the Reagan era, reactionary Republicans, enabled by Democrats, have continued to roll back and vilify New Deal reforms.
And now what holds us back? Except for Dennis Kucinich, all the Democratic candidates want only to expand the dysfunctional for-profit system, guaranteeing customers and cash to insurance companies who now hold both US health care and the US economy by the throat. If Democrats were united around not-for-profit universal health care, the country might not be facing the first UAW strike against GM since 1970.
The union's goals may be for historical reasons defensive, but they merit our support and a commitment to take the offensive in demanding universal health care and a return to the social contract.
Screw 'em! This group put their support behind Clinton and not Dennis Kucinich. If they don't support change, they don't get change.
Let them lie down in the crap they created!!!
Union Yes? GM lets the UAW take care of part of the problem. Unions sometimes work against the workers, who may live under the illusion of better representation. The parallel is stark with Americans who may believe or be completely indifferent to a so-called Democracy as the US proclaims itself to be.
Over the years, certain working groups have just steadily lost ground. Real wages, pensions, stability, health care.
When you read about auto workers, GM and the UAW in the MSM, there is this intractable persistent amnesia about what has already been negotiated away to be lost for ever.
Single payer healthcare would be a boon to this country. Imagine how it would free people to innovate and start small businesses. Culturally we would flourish also as artists, musicians, writers, even small farmers, daycare providers, stay-at-home mothers, and anyone who wished to freelance would have access to affordable healthcare. I can't imagine how the bad could possibly outweigh the public good.
It would be the single greatest public initiative in this country since the WPA, which, by the way, needs to be re-created. As jobs go overseas, our country can both provide jobs and rebuild PUBLIC infrastructure, and we MIGHT have the possibility of achieving greatness and feeling pride in ourselves and our country once again.