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UAW Members: We Can’t Afford McCain |
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Nicole Lowe’s 5-year-old son has asthma. Like any other parent of a child with a chronic illness, she has spent many anxious hours in the emergency room.
A member of UAW Local 140 in Warren, Mich., Lowe worries that her union-negotiated health care benefit could be taxed under John McCain’s health care plan, an extra expense she cannot afford. She could even lose health care coverage under McCain’s plan.
Says Lowe:
“We get taxed enough and a tax on health care on top of that just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Now Lowe and Joel Blatchford, a member of UAW Local 5960 in Lake Orion, Mich., are taking to the airwaves to deliver the message that we can’t afford a McCain presidency that will continue the disastrous policies of George Bush. The two workers appear in a newly launched television, radio and Internet advertising campaign by the UAW’s Voluntary Community Action Program (V-CAP). (See videos.)
The 30-second ads are running in four key states: Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. More than half of the UAW’s active and retired members live in those states.
Says UAW President Ron Gettelfinger:
In these uncertain times, everyone is concerned about jobs, wages, health care and pensions. These are the issues that will decide this election—and nobody can talk about these issues better than people like Joel and Nicole, who go to work every day and do their best to support their families.
According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund, McCain’s health care tax could cost a typical two-wage earner family $1,119 in higher taxes by 2013 and $2,809 in higher taxes by 2018.
Newsweek economics correspondent Jane Bryant Quinn writes that if McCain’s health care plan was put into effect, it would drop 20 million people from employer coverage and throw them into the shark tank of the private insurance world, and “will raise your costs without changing the game.”
Families like Lowe’s could lose their health care coverage altogether, because many insurance companies will not sell individual policies to anyone with a pre-existing condition, such as her son’s asthma. The CAP Action Fund has estimated that under the McCain plan, as many as 56 million people with chronic diseases like asthma could completely lose health care coverage.
Blatchford, who recently became a grandfather, is concerned about the future prospects for his children and grandchildren. The United States has lost nearly 4 million family-supporting manufacturing jobs since Bush took office in 2001, and McCain intends to continue the same failed policies. Says Blatchford:
Just like Bush, McCain has no ideas for getting new jobs here. He’s supporting more bad trade deals and more tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas. My friends are losing their jobs; his friends are getting bigger tax breaks.
The UAW has endorsed Barack Obama and Joe Biden for president and vice president, describing the two senators whose bases are in auto-producing states as
proven leaders who have a track record of support for working families, and fighting for the good-paying jobs that keep our country strong.
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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
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Santa Fe’s minimum wage raise to $8.50/hr (now $9.50/hr, soon indexed) lost lower skilled workers a significant number of jobs (8.3%, adjusted for something – nominal employment rose) many to higher skilled replacements, according to a think tank committed to protecting the working poor from higher wages.
Could such pay/employment trade-offs lie in the future as America catches up wages with productivity growth?
Simple (ask any minimum wage earner) job/wage resolution:
1) If lower skilled workers lose a percentage of jobs to a higher minimum wage (or any broadband wage increase), they should earn more over a lifetime because they will earn more when they are working ($3.35/hr more in 2005 Santa Fe!) – which should be most of the time.
2) Higher skilled workers would be earning enough extra to pay a bit more in taxes to fund some cover for the lower skilled if needed.
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Quick lopsided income tutorial:
At $186,000/yr, the average family income reported by the Census for top 20 percentile families may sound out of proportion – your typical primary care provider earning well below that these days – but it is about what we should expect if family income growth matched per capita income growth reported by the same Census: doubled since 1968, when $95,000/yr was the top 20 average.
What is out of proportion is the Census reporting 100% per capita income growth along with 67% (overall) family income growth since 1968 – a 33% family shortfall? The presumed missing 33% — presumably hidden by the Census practice of “top coding” income over $1 million per family out of its survey — would add $111,000 to the top quintile average – presuming family income grew exactly the same pace as per capita income since 1968.
Family income may have grown closer to 90% over those years: still leaving $85,000 hidden by the top code (not $111,000): still making for 185% top quintile growth (not 212%), still comparing lopsidedly to the 12%, 22%, 37% and 53% eked out by lower quintiles (much due to more members working more hours). If we add enough dollars to lower quintile 2007 incomes to bring them into line with 90% growth: the four lower additions total up to the lopsided dollop of top income, dollar for dollar (by mathematical definition).
If we could somehow throw a reset switch to share around 2007’s doubled personal income according to 1973’s distribution, lower four quintile wage earners would remain in the same relative (skill/pay) bargaining positions vis-à-vis each other in the job market – making for little expectation of more unemployment — ditto for shaved-income top earners: my “Chinese snake dance” theory of labor price and employment.
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It is not under-priced labor — in the sense of people here and overseas willing to work for less — that is dragging down American wages and causing whole-segment unemployment (see very many American born cab drivers or fast food workers lately?). It is the under-pricing of labor that is causing America’s Great Wage Depression (my term covering both lost pay and lost jobs).
If Australia had a 1000 mile land border with China – open, Mexican-American style – Australian labor would need powerful wage support legislation to maintain its native pay and employment at maximum levels: a solid minimum wage (1/2 the “real” average wage — USA “real” meaning $25/hr; reported AWI up only 20% since 1968) plus the most up to date collective bargaining structure known as sector-wide labor agreements (not the card check attempt to wring one more drop of life out of all but dead labor law — Australian could actually consider sector wide now that its once effective if eccentric wage support structure has badly eroded).
America’s is the only modern OECD labor market facing the double whammy of globalization and yearly immigrating millions; and yet remains the only modern OECD market seriously devoid of legislative defenses against either outside low wage expectations or against the home grown race to the bottom (recently introducing whole-segment unemployment to middle class, would-have-been supermarket employees).