Health Care Kumbaya
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| Protest against health insurers need to have both a union and community face—like this march both against foreclosures and for the Employee Free Choice Act earlier in March in Lynn, Mass. |
The peasants are filing their pitchforks to a fine point in anticipation of an attack on the palace—and the target of their ire is not what we might have intended. At this critical moment in the health care debate, more than a few working folk are taking a suspicious look at the health care reform efforts of Senate Democrats, President Obama—and their own unions. A headline in my local newspaper, the Lynn Item, helped stir the tempest: “Obama Open to Taxing Benefits to Fund Reform.”
Vincent Panvani of the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) warns:
If any of these Democratic Senators vote for this, they’ll be out in 2010, and it will be used against Obama….[Y]ou’re taxing the middle class.
Teamsters President James Hoffa calls taxing health care benefits “the poison pill that will kill reform.” The Laborers have attack ads at the ready. And Donna Smith, an organizer and legislative representative for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) notes that insurance companies continue discriminatory rates for older workers and ongoing rescissions of benefits—that is, targeting people with more than 1,400 medical conditions for “opposition research” investigations so their benefits can be cut off. “Ugly stuff,” she puts it. (At a health care forum in Lynn, Mass., last week, Rep. John Tierney reported that in congressional hearings he asked every insurance company if they would stop these viscous targeted rescissions—each one said “No.”)
Bipartisan Bill Would Strengthen Guest Worker Rules
Under current law, unscrupulous employers are free to abuse guest worker programs by exploiting workers, driving down standards and, often, displacing U.S. workers. This hurts all workers and gives these employers an unfair competitive advantage over businesses that play by the rules.
Bipartisan legislation introduced yesterday would provide much-needed security and higher standards in two of the programs. The H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, introduced by Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), would enhance protections within these visa programs.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney praised the legislation, saying it “makes progress in combating fraud and abuse within the H-1B and L-1 temporary worker programs.”
It’s time for our nation to put an end to employer abuse of these worker programs. Employers should neither be allowed to displace domestic workers nor intimidate guest workers and drive their working standards below those of the domestic labor market.
