Troublemakers Schools

Labor Rallies for Health Care, But Keeps it Vague

— Jane Slaughter

It’s no secret that the union movement is divided on health care reform. Resolutions favoring “Medicare for All,” a single-payer system, have been passed by 558 unions, central labor councils, state federations, and other union organizations. Yet in practice leaders of many of those same unions have acted as if actual single-payer legislation (Representative John Conyer’s HR 676 and Senator Bernie Sanders’ S703) didn’t exist.

They’ve promoted milder changes that will leave private insurance companies in place, instead of kicking them out of the temple, as every other industrialized country—from Canada to Japan—has done. In effect, labor’s leaders are placing on the table first what logically should be their fall-back position.

They’ve gone along with the D.C. consensus that the most that can be won is a plan that includes a “public option” to compete in the marketplace with private companies. And they’re not wrong about the unwillingness of this Congress to buck the system. Conyers was asked in May, “What would it take this Congress to pass single payer?” He replied, “Nuclear weaponry.”

Even so, the staunchest single-payer advocates believe they will win most by continuing to agitate for what they really want rather than a compromise. These folks see large amounts of activists’ anger and energy wasted.

RALLY FOR?

A big June 25 rally at the Capitol sponsored by the AFL-CIO and Health Care for America Now (HCAN), both of which steer clear of single payer, was attended by 7,000 people. But the organizers “didn’t know what to get them fired up about,” said Mark Dudzic of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer.

“It was a good, high-spirited group of people, who want to fight, who honestly believe they’re fighting for national health care,” he said. “A lot of the focus of the rally was to mobilize anger at private insurance companies, and it’s tragic where the leaders want to leave those folks.”

John Armelagos, grievance chair at the University of Michigan Professional Nurse Council, said the rally and subsequent lobbying visits were well-scripted but light on details. Every speaker, Democratic leaders and union heads alike, promised that any health care bill that emerged would include some “public option,” and most participants cheered.

“They thought that would save the day,” he said. “It was all very fluid and not concrete.”

When New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer kicked off the rally with a speech heavy on rally slogans, a large group of single-payer supporters in front began chanting “we want single payer.” He ignored them, and the rally marshals walked them to the back of the crowd.

Armelagos said the rally’s most specific speaker, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, attacked a proposed tax on already existing health-care benefits, an idea gaining popularity among Democratic senators. The intent is to raise part of the estimated $1.2 trillion needed to expand coverage using the current private-insurance model. (Such a tax would hit many union members, who enjoy better-than-average coverage.)

Obama campaigned last year against John McCain’s proposal to tax benefits, but now won’t rule the idea out. Armelagos left D.C. frustrated that labor’s efforts are now devoted to fighting a position taken by Republicans in the last election, leaving wide open other crucial questions.

For instance, if most insurance will still be provided by employers, he asks, “does that mean people who don’t have jobs won’t have coverage?”

Madelyn Elder, president of Communications Workers (CWA) Local 7901, talked to rally participants who said over and over they’d prefer single payer “because it would be the cheapest and easiest way, but there’s no way we’d get it passed in Congress.” A subsidiary variation included, “I’d hate to lay off all those people who work in the private health insurance industry.”

While visiting senators, Armelagos’s group noted that Democrats outmuscled Republicans to pass Medicare four decades ago, making the program so popular that 13 GOP senators jumped on board.

He and other United American Nurses union delegates endorsed a single-payer health care system at their 2007 convention, but he’s convinced today’s Democrats don’t have the fortitude to stand up to the health care lobby. So, he thinks, it’s better to get something than nothing.

“If single payer doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell—even if three of four citizens want a national health plan—we’ve got to get something now,” he said. “There’s too many folks out there hurting real bad.”

BETTER THAN NOTHING?

Is something better than nothing? It’s too soon to predict what will come out of the wrangling—the insurance industry’s Harry-and-Louise-type commercials that helped sink health care reform in 1994 haven’t even started yet. But we can imagine three possible scenarios.

1. The whole reform debate collapses of its own weight. Dudzic predicts that people will resist the unpopular elements that would have to be included to pay the high price of keeping private insurance at the core of the system. Those include “individual mandates,” as in Massachusetts’s plan, that require each person to buy his or her own coverage (like car insurance). Private insurers have lured away the healthiest of the population, saddling the state with the sickest and leaving Massachusetts’s mandates under strain. Limits were placed on enrollment this year and services, including dental coverage, were cut.

Taxation of existing health care benefits, a poison pill for unions, is also likely to be broadly unpopular. Members of Congress who get an earful from their constituents during the August recess may well decide that no bill is worth the cost of alienating many voters (and campaign donors).

2. Compromise legislation will be so unfavorable to working and poor people that even the most eager compromisers in the labor movement feel they must oppose it. A tax on benefits, an HMO-like public option so restricted it’s doomed to fail, a subsidy plan that fails to relieve working people of the high cost of insurance—any combination of these could be a cure worse than the disease.

Even then, some unions could be tempted to support a bad bill in hopes it will serve their particular ends. A union focused on organizing low-wage workers, for example, finds the cost of benefits a main reason why employers fight organizing drives so hard. The Service Employees (SEIU), with its homecare, childcare, and security guard drives, is a case in point. If a new government health care program subsidized benefits for poor workers, perhaps their employers would be more open to signing deals that let the union in the door.

Another factor that could cause some unions to support even a bad bill is the desire not to displease the Obama administration. They want the Employee Free Choice Act, and they may hope that making nice over health care reform could win them points. This is the “if I let you kick me once, you won’t feel the need to kick me twice” school of unionism.

According to Dudzic, the desire not to make waves extends even to the insurance companies. “The view,” he says, “is that we can’t piss off the insurance companies because they’ll run Harry-and-Louise ads, but they’re going to do it anyway.”

3.A bill will be good enough that most labor leaders feel they should support it. A bill that mandates that employers pay for insurance and includes a decent public option would be seen by some as a victory, by others as a livable compromise. SEIU paved the way this week when it released a letter co-signed with Wal-Mart that supports forcing most employers to offer insurance to workers.

However, this is the least likely of the three options. As Obama has signaled his willingness to go along with just about anything, more and more activists are convinced that any public option will be only lip service.

In fact, at an AFL-CIO meeting in mid-June, some affiliate representatives pushed AFL-CIO political operative Gerry Shea to say where the federation would draw the line on the parameters of a public option. Shea wouldn’t say, but some fear that the real answer is “wherever Obama tells us.” Mark Gaffney, head of the Michigan AFL-CIO, volunteered to write to the federation asking for clarity on its lobbyists’ bottom line.

One union, CWA, highlighted its demands as it dispatched hundreds of delegates from its yearly convention to the D.C. rally: a public option, no taxes on working people’s benefits, retiree health care for those not yet Medicare-eligible, and a “play or pay” option for all employers.

Taxing benefits is the deal-killer for most unions. Given how universally unions oppose such a plan, it indicates the disregard for labor in the administration and Congress that the idea was even floated.

Thirty-one union presidents signed a letter to senators arguing against such a regressive tax. Of course, in a tactic long used with members, union leaders may later claim that keeping taxation of benefits out of the final bill equals a victory.

THE DARK HORSE

Though it’s a long shot, the best outcome might be a bill that allows the states to experiment with single payer. Voters in California have approved a single-payer system for their state twice, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Senator Sanders of Vermont is backing such a provision, and Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is organizing support in the House. Some single-payer lobbyists are trying to get a state option attached to other legislation.

“Enabling states to do single payer actually moves us closer to a single-payer solution than a public option does,” said Michael Lighty, the California Nurses Association’s director of public policy. Lighty said that a successful program in a big state like California would lead other states to follow suit. He pointed out that in Canada, single-payer health care was initially adopted one province at a time, leading eventually to a federal system.

“But if you pass a plan that’s watered down and bad, you’ve squandered the political moment,” Lighty said. “You’re going to fuel the cynicism and distrust so many people already have in what can be accomplished in Washington.”

BARGAINING TACTICS

Say you’re a union bargainer who thinks her members deserve a dollar-an-hour raise, but believes that realistically the company won’t give more than 50 cents. Would you start out by asking for 50 cents? Yet that’s what union lobbyists are doing, in effect, around health care reform in D.C. this year. It’s how labor has been doing its politics for a while now: behaving as supplicants rather than as actors trying to define the game, consenting to the accepted wisdom.

Ironically, the desire to be “relevant” and at the table is leaving much of official labor with little actually to say. The tragedy of this year’s morass, say unionists passionate about universal health care, is that any legislation that stitches insurance companies into the heart of the health care system now makes it that much harder to get them out of the way later.

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Additional reporting by Mischa Gaus.

Bargaining in a Recession

— Derek Blackadder

There’s no rocket science to a contract campaign during a recession. But it is different. You can even come out the other side with a stronger union. Here are a few ideas on how.

1. Start now. Even if your contract isn’t up for two years and you think you have some lag time. Or you think your employer isn’t going to be affected for a while. You can’t wait. Can’t.

An aggressive employer is going to use the recession as an excuse to come after your collective agreement. They won’t wait to see how the recession hits your workplace. Or even if.

Do everything you would normally do, but start way sooner, and do much more of it.

2. Inoculate your co-workers. They are continually exposed to stories in the media about how workers somewhere have taken concessions. Think you’ve heard it all about GM? Think again. Municipal workers in Windsor, Ontario, have been on strike for two months over demands for concessions on retiree benefits that use the downturn in the auto industry as the excuse.

To overcome the demoralizing effects of the media and an employer campaign, you need to prepare before it really sinks in. Start collecting success stories. Find workers who were around in the last recession and collect their stories about bargaining then. Even if the stories don’t have a happy ending, knowing how the employer bargains and campaigns (because they will campaign) will be useful.

3. Whether it’s on a wiki or on a blackboard in somebody’s basement, there has to be a plan. One that’s visible, something that can be checked regularly for a progress report. Something with dates, to-do lists, assigned responsibilities, and goals. Note when it will be revisited and amended.

4. Organize the organized. Your co-workers need to be more mobilized, more invested, and more in control of what happens all the way through bargaining than they have ever been before. Sit down with your union’s activists, walk through the process step by step, and maximize their input and control starting from today.

Inventory the union’s resources. Stewards. Research. Communication tools like newsletters, e-mail lists, text-message trees. Map the workplace and start identifying the concerns your co-workers have about this round of bargaining. Who has them? Why? Where are they? Develop your responses and test them.

5. Organize the unorganized. Non-union workers in or connected to your workplace? Develop or check in with your contacts. The insecurity a recession generates can push workers to take an interest in organizing, especially when the unionized workers do well. If they can organize before your bargaining starts, you’ll all be better off.

6. Turn it around on your employer. Is this an opportunity to take the offensive? With many employers, especially in the public sector, this may be your chance to go over the books and the employer’s admin costs with a fine-tooth comb.

In the last recession, Toronto area municipal workers were able to contract in services by arguing that cities were amortizing the cost of roads equipment too quickly. The equipment was lasting up to 10 years but was off the books in four, raising the apparent cost of doing the work in-house.

If cuts are coming, make sure that management takes more than its fair share. Look closely at administrative overhead, especially anything contracted out. Can your co-workers do that work? At what cost? (See Labor Notes October 2008, “Why Privatize? We Can Run It Better!”)

7. Victory isn’t always measured in dollars and cents. If you’re going to get less than you should in compensation, is there anything else you can substitute? Try for language gains or increases in “buried” cost like vacations during a round of recession bargaining.

CUPE social service workers in Ontario, bargaining now, are making big gains in health and safety language and protection from contracting out by coordinating across the province. In more than half the cases they’ve even won pensions for the first time. Better yet, workers are talking about issues that usually don’t get a lot of attention compared with compensation. They’re expanding their bargaining horizons—permanently.

8. Your employer playing nice guy? Proposing job-sharing for junior workers or exit packages or buyouts for the more senior? If there’s even a chance of this, prepare in advance.

Job-sharing may sound like a great idea to workers worried about losing all of their income, but in most cases layoffs come anyway. Unemployment benefits will be based on income prior to layoff. Does it make sense to job-share if it will mean less in benefits after layoff?

Be prepared to walk workers through the costs and benefits of exit packages. They rarely work in the members’ favor, and they foster a focus on individual solutions, not collective ones. If your workforce has a two-tier wage set-up, the union is further weakened when senior workers leave.

Both job-sharing and exit packages can hugely affect workplace morale and mobilization levels. They can make a cost-cutting employer seem humane.

9. Research, research, research. Recession bargaining can be more technical than we’re used to. Know your employer’s markets, customers, and suppliers, its funders and clients.

10. Know the impact on your community if your employer gets concessions. Will potential allies be affected? Don’t overlook a city council worried about its tax base or even a chamber of commerce concerned about lost local buying power.

11. Don’t panic. This isn’t the first recession; it won’t be the last. Workers and unions have gotten through them before; we’ll get through this one. Start your plan early, mobilize your members, do your homework.

Your co-workers will be energized, workplace solidarity will be high, and once the pressure eases you can go from holding the line to moving forward. Use the recession to build organizing capacity for the next round of bargaining.

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Derek Blackadder is a Canadian Union of Public Employees national rep.

Smithfield Meatpackers Stay Off Work To Demand Martin Luther King Holiday

— William Johnson

21 immigrant meatpackers were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers January 24 at the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. ICE spokespeople told the Associated Press that workers were arrested on “administrative immigration charges,” but United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) organizer Eduardo Peña, who’s been organizing at the plant for more than four years, believes the ICE raid was an act of retaliation. To learn more about the Smithfield workers’ struggle, go to Justice at Smithfield.

Hundreds of meatpackers from the Smithfield Foods hog processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina honored Martin Luther King Jr. Day at a January 15 rally in nearby Fayetteville, where they lambasted the company for its refusal to give workers the holiday off.

Smithfield’s 5,000 Tar Heel workers, the majority of whom are Black and Latino, have been trying to organize into the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) since the early 1990s. The company has responded with, in the words of one federal court ruling, “intense and widespread coercion”: retaliatory firings, intimidation, and beatings by plant security.

According to UFCW organizer Eduardo Peña, support for Smithfield workers at the Fayetteville rally was “overwhelming.” Some 700 people attended the rally, where community and religious leaders attacked Smithfield for its treatment of the Tar Heel workers, while many workers made the connection between their struggle and Dr. King’s legacy.

“He died for the workers,” Smithfield worker Johnnie Davis told the Associated Press, referring to King’s involvement with a Memphis sanitation workers strike at the time of his assassination. “He died for us.”

In early January, 4,000 workers at the Tar Heel plant signed a petition requesting a paid holiday on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is recognized as a state holiday in North Carolina. When they presented the petition to Smithfield Vice President Larry Johnson on January 9, he refused to accept it.

According to Smithfield worker Keith Ludlum, the company explained its refusal in part by noting that workers were recently allowed to vote on whether they could have a paid holiday for Martin Luther King Day or Easter. The workers chose Easter, but Ludlum said that the vote left a bad taste in his mouth.

“What we’re telling the company,” said Ludlum, “is they’re asking us to choose between Jesus and Martin Luther King. We think they’re both important and we should honor both of them.”

Ludlum said that Tar Heel workers were “extremely upset” that Smithfield refused to even consider the petition. According to Ludlum, “It got a lot of workers saying they’re not going to show up for work, or that they’ll show up, get the line started, get some hogs killed and hanging, and then walk out.”

BRIDGING THE DIVIDE

Campaigning around Martin Luther King Day allowed UFCW organizers to tackle one of their biggest obstacles: the divide between Tar Heel’s Black and Latino workers. Last spring, when immigrants rallied across the country demanding fair immigration reform, many of Smithfield’s Latino workers walked off the job in solidarity, while most Black workers remained at work.

Ludlum explained that the vote to choose between Easter and Martin Luther King Day reflected, and exploited, those divisions: “A majority of the workers at the plant were Latino and immigrant, they didn’t know the history of Martin Luther King, but of course they know what Easter is.”

To bridge the Black/Latino divide, Smithfield workers organized an educational campaign during the lead-up to Martin Luther King Day. Said Ludlum, “We’ve been passing out flyers in Spanish explaining the history of Dr. King, the fact that he fought for all people, that when he took the bullet he was supporting sanitation workers in Memphis who wanted to be treated with respect.”

According to Eduardo Peña, who’s been organizing in Tar Heel for more than four years, the educational work paid off. Said Peña: “We’ve got Latino workers here ready to walk out for the holiday. I hear them saying things like, ‘People assume that we don’t know who King was—his struggle was the same struggle we’re going through now.’”

COMPANY RESPONSE

As buzz about the Martin Luther King Day walkout spread, Smithfield announced January 11 that workers who took the holiday off could be fired. “Some of the workers were intimidated,” said Peña. “The company publicly threatened them—in the media, with a press release.”

Peña said management also pressured workers individually to come to work on the holiday. Said Peña, “They targeted senior workers, people who already had points against them, told them, ‘If you go out, you’ll most likely lose your job.’”

According to Peña, Smithfield also went after recent hires, telling them flatly, ‘If you walk out, you’re fired.’

The threat of retaliation had convinced many workers who signed the original petition to show up for work on the holiday. Despite that, the union estimates that between 400-500 workers didn’t work on Martin Luther King Day, with many of them heading to Fayetteville for the rally.

SLOWING THE LINES

In the plant, the walkout had a serious impact. According to Peña, first-shift production was dramatically reduced, while some managers had to work until midnight to meet production goals.

Said Peña, “In this type of facility, just a few workers missing has a big impact. If you’re working one of those specialized jobs and you don’t show up, everything slows down. In some departments, dozens of people were missing [on the holiday] and the lines were moving very, very slow.”

When workers returned to the plant, they found the company had backed down from its threats of disciplinary action. Management posted an announcement saying that there would be no retaliation against workers who walked out.

Said Peña, “Workers that ended up working [on the holiday] are very angry…we told them, ‘If we stick together, the company doesn’t have the ability to discipline us.’”

Peña said that by backing down from its threats, Smithfield has also given the union more credibility. “The company is making it easier for us to do our work,” he explained. “We’re telling workers, ‘See, the company only responds to action. We can’t win by negotiating, we win by walking out, by taking action.’ And it’s working.”

Beyond affecting production, Peña said that the workplace education around Martin Luther King Day could have a lasting impact. “You don’t build African-American/Latino unity by doing a flyer or coming up with a catchy phrase,” he said. “You do it by educating workers and letting them decide what they’re going to do.”

Peña believes that the walkout, and the Smithfield plant’s legacy of militant action, is laying the foundation for a strong union in Tar Heel.

“This local union will be established with a history of struggle,” said Peña. “When the bargaining committee sits down with the company, there won’t be any question in the company’s mind of whether the union will be militant—they’ve already seen walkouts, demonstrations.

Peña concluded: “Nothing’s been easy here. There won’t be any secret ballot election to win the union. It’s a question of whether the workers want to fight for it or not. That’s why the company is so afraid. That’s what’s going to make it so sweet.”

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