Health Care Reform Needs Public Option—Not Band-Aid
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Today, union and health care activists around the country are raising their voices against the private health insurance companies’ mutlimillion-dollar campaign to block health care reform. In dozens of rallies and demonstrations they are saying: “Big Insurance: We’re sick of it.”
Union members are joining a march on Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association’s Portland, Ore., headquarters. In a letter to Blue Cross President Scott Serota, Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain calls on the company to cease opposition to a public health insurance option and stop the use of union members’ premium payments to fund lobbying against a public option.
Union members in Oregon have spent too many years at the bargaining table knowing that they have to choose between bargaining for better wages, or maintaining their healthcare. This is unsustainable; healthcare reform with true cost controls is necessary. For union members to now see their healthcare dollars spent lobbying against the reform they support is absolutely unacceptable.
Oregon Bill Bans Mandatory Anti-Union Meetings
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When Oregon workers are choosing to form a union and bargain for a better life, they would not be forced to attend coercive, mandatory anti-union meetings by management under the Worker Freedom Act passed Monday by the Oregon State Senate. It now goes to the House, where it won approval in 2007.
The legislation will make it illegal for an employer to discipline or fire a worker who chooses not to attend a meeting on politics, religion or union organizing during work hours.
Says Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain:
Workers should not have to give up their opinions or be lectured about their employer’s beliefs to get a paycheck.
Wyden Wants to Tax Health Care Benefits
Last year, in his failed run for the presidency, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) proposed taxing working families’ health care benefits as part of his deeply flawed plan for health care reform.
The reaction was direct and swift. “No!” said unions, health care reform advocates and consumers. Candidate Barack Obama blasted the McCain proposal.
But today, the idea of taxing health care benefits has resurfaced, and from an unlikely source: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who for most of his career has been a good friend of working families. His call to tax your health care benefits is buried in legislation (S. 391) that he introduced this year and is now being considered by the Senate Finance Committee as one of several possible ways to finance health care reform.
State Workers, Taxpayers Caught in a Fiscal Vise
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The badly needed economic recovery package included some substantial assistance for states that are facing growing budget shortfalls, possible layoffs and cuts in vital services. But despite critics’ noise about the amount of spending in the package, even with that helping hand, the fiscal outlook for states is still “dire” and likely will worsen, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):
The state fiscal situation is dire. Revenues are declining, and the need for services such as Medicaid is rising as people lose income and jobs….If revenue declines persist as expected in many states, additional budget cuts are likely. Budget cuts often are more severe in the second year of a state fiscal crisis, after reserves have been largely depleted and thus are no longer an option for closing deficits.
AFL-CIO Announces Center for Green Jobs
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As part of the AFL-CIO union movement’s commitment to fighting for green jobs, President John Sweeney and other union leaders today announced a major program to help working Americans prepare for the next generation of jobs by creating a Center for Green Jobs.
Starting with $1 million from the Working for America Institute, the AFL-CIO’s workforce and economic development arm, the center will partner with affiliated unions to help pave the way to good union jobs in a variety of the country’s unionized and greening industries. The center also will spread the lessons of AFL-CIO affiliates who have successfully joined the green economy, especially in manufacturing.
At a packed press conference this morning in Washington, D.C., Sweeney said the center is part of the AFL-CIO’s effort to “make progressive energy and climate change a first order priority.”
