One issue dominating union contract negotiations in every industry around the country—healthcare benefits. No one has anything like security in their lives if a sudden illness or catastrophic accident can wipe out their family’s savings or they can’t get the medical attention they need and face death because they can’t afford help.

Union members attempt to achieve three types of security in bargaining their contracts—job security, retirement security and health care security. When we bargain for health security, we bump head-on into the structural problems of the U.S. health system.

Although most people would agree that health care is a right, this system treats it as a privilege for those who can afford it or those whose unions are strong enough to bargain for it.

Under this privatized, profit driven healthcare delivery system the HMOs and the PPOs focus on making money instead of making people well. They do this by raising prices and cutting corners, especially with their labor force.

The end result is a costly and inefficient medical system reflecting the country’s economic class divisions of haves and have nots. More than 40 million Americans have no health insurance at all and nearly another 40 million have only partial and inadequate coverage. Here in the wealthiest country on the planet, in the world’s only superpower, people still suffer and die from treatable conditions and diseases.

But this is not an insoluble problem. Nearly all the other industrialized countries and even many developing nations have some form of a national healthcare system. Elsewhere societies and governments understand that the physical well-being of their citizens is a basic pillar of society and the responsibility of everyone—and they allocate their resources accordingly. But not in the U.S.

Here the ideology of the free market is so revered and corporations’ “right” to make profits is held so sacred that government officials would rather watch their own population die than attempt anything so “socialist” as extending health care to everyone. This has to change and it has to change very soon.

The rank and file of the ILWU understands this completely. Locals from all over the Coast and Hawaii came to our International Convention a couple of months ago with resolutions aimed in that direction and the delegates passed them all
enthusiastically. The International Convention, the highest decision making body in the ILWU, declared a national single-payer heathcare program to be the union’s top legislative priority. The Convention also decided the union would in the meantime work for progressive incremental advances that would provide more health care to more people. In that spirit Convention delegates also supported a bill in the California legislature (SB2) that would required employers to purchase healthcare coverage for their employees or pay a fee into a state fund that would purchase such coverage for the uninsured.

Even though union workers have some of the best health insurance in the country, organized labor must take a leading role in the fight for universal coverage. In every contract we negotiate, the ever-escalating costs of health care make keeping the benefits we have more and more difficult. For example, in the West Coast longshore contract we settled last year, the cost
to the employers to maintain our level of benefits will more than double over the life of the agreement.

Employers complain that these rising costs make them less and less competitive with non-union companies and try to use that to cut back on our benefits or increase our copays. Or we end up accepting lower wage increases or reductions in other benefits to keep our health coverage. But if we are able to take that issue off the bargaining table, we stand a better chance of making gains on other items.

The biggest obstacle to making any progress on this, of course, is the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. As ILWU Legislative Director Lindsay McLaughlin points out, we can get more than a glimpse of the Republican take on health care by examining the Medicare prescription drug plan Congress just passed. It will give minimal price relief to the vast majority of seniors and maximize private health insurers’ and drug companies’ profits by putting no control on drug prices.
The House version of the plan actually calls for converting Medicare into privatized voucher system in six years.

The Bush-Republican Congress agenda clearly is the most vicious anti-working-family plan the American labor movement has faced in more than a century. Every week it seems they trash one more right or program workers have fought hard
for, from the right of government workers to unionize to the guarantee of overtime pay, piling attacks one on top of another to
suffocate any hope of resistance. Sometimes it seems they get little gain from some of their attacks, as if they do it just to be cruel, just because they can.

The Bush and Republican record shows their agenda is the devastation of all worker political power in this country, yet they continue to ride high in the polls. We still have more than a year to turn that around, but it’s not too early to begin an “anyone but Bush” campaign. He’s already tried to destroy our union once. He, his pals and his policies need to be taken out now.

Bush administration overtime takeaway

continued from page 1
by overtime protection. This has the potential of displacing millions of hourly workers.

Lucky you have a union
Fortunately for you, these rules will not directly affect union workers. Union members have a contract which provides overtime protection beyond what the law requires. Most union contracts requires overtime after 8 hours in a day and 40 hours a week. In addition, most union contracts require overtime for work on holidays and days of rest—a benefit which is not required by law.

Union members, however, can be affected if management tries to take advantage of the new rules to take work opportunity away from union workers. Management may try to avoid paying overtime by sending union workers home after 8 hours a
day, or 40 hours a week, and use exempt employees like supervisors to finish the work. Management may also deliberately schedule less then the needed number of workers and use supervisors to cover the shortage.

Union members need to challenge management and file a grievance whenever this happens. Members also need to look at negotiating stronger contract language that limits or prohibits management from taking work opportunity and overtime away from union workers. 

See the Washington Report on page 3 for more information on the Bush attack on overtime.