Moving on...
SEIU Creates Union for Health Care Workers, Including Nurses, Service Workers at Hospitals, Nursing Homes
The Service Employees International Union, which has about 1.8 million members, on Friday in Baltimore plans to launch a new health care union that will serve about one million members who work in the industry, such as nurses and service workers at hospitals and nursing homes, the Baltimore Sun reports. SEIU Healthcare, which will have an annual budget of about $100 million, will combine financial and personnel resources, as well as political priorities and proposals, from the 38 local SEIU health care unions to improve health care practices and promote universal health insurance. However, the local SEIU health care unions will retain their leaders and authority in local and collective bargaining politics.
Up in New York, SEIU 1199, the healthcare workers union, is a major player in state politics, making donations to both sides of the aisle - Republicans have seemingly forever dominated the state Senate, though that seems poised to change in '08, Democrats having taken over the governorship and the legislature. But the point is that with healthcare being such a big issue in the states, which are overwhelmed with underfunded Medicaid and SCHIP, strong healthcare labor unions can have a big influence.
To go back to the NY example, Governor Spitzer tried to cut $12 billion from healthcare in his first budget this past spring. The money was to go to education, but the healthcare cuts were untenable; he was paring from hospitals, nursing homes and Medicaid, not pharma payments and insurance subsidies. So SEIU 1199 teamed up with the Working Families Party (a fairly influential third-party in NY) and the Greater NY Hospital Association to fight against the cuts. Launching a massive grassroots and media campaign, they were able to beat back $8 billion of the $12 billion in cuts. And that was against a Democrat who had just won with 70% of the vote. Imagine a national network, using locals to fuel a national campaign.
--Freelancers turn to unions for help on health insurance
While lawmakers play political football with the nation's health insurance dilemma, some unusual alliances have been formed to run interference for a growing but largely overlooked group: freelancers like Giarratano. Freelance, self-employed, consultant, temp and other independent workers account for about a third of the U.S. work force.
This month a New York nonprofit group founded by a recipient of the MacArthur foundation "genius" award began offering health insurance to independent workers and their families in 30 states, including Georgia.
The Freelancers Union already provides insurance to some 15,000 New Yorkers, some of whom became freelancers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"People should be able to do the kind of work they want to do. They shouldn't be making that decision based on getting health insurance," said Sara Horowitz, a New York labor attorney and third-generation union organizer who founded the freelancers' group.
Dee Giarratano has never had much use for unions.
"I've pretty much been against unions most of my working life," the 48-year-old Atlanta resident said.
"I'm a huge believer in free-market competition. It's been my experience that unions have priced themselves out of the market."
These days, however, the self-employed computer programming consultant has "a different take on unions."
As an independent worker, he's had a tough time finding affordable health insurance. He currently pays about $475 a month in a risk pool run by Blue Cross Blue Shield. That's roughly half of what he pays to rent his condo.
Lately, Giarratano has run across several cases where unions or some semblance of them have teamed with big health insurers to provide health coverage. The concept is intriguing to Giarratano.
"It's an incredibly wise marketing tactic on unions' part," said Giarratano, managing partner of eJobCost LLC, which provides Web-based services and sells software to construction firms.
"Free-market systems aren't gonna cut it. There's going to be more and more people like me turning to collective bargaining entities for some relief from high health insurance," he said.
"I wonder if the health care crisis is going to be the rebirth of unions?"
Unions have been prescient in fighting for this for a long time. Now that it's a crisis, they are organized, equipped and ready to take the lead, injecting themselves into national prominence once again.
AT&T to Return 650 More Outsourced Jobs
AT&T announced this week that it will be bringing back from overseas nearly 650 Tier I DSL technical support jobs and locating them in Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, later this year. The jobs are coming back to the United States as part of the agreement CWA reached with AT&T last fall to return the tech support work that had been contracted overseas.
Nice. Tech jobs have been decimated by outsourcing, and the new visa plan that would allow employers to import high skilled workers, pay them anything they want and force the workers to leave after five years, is an attempt to outsource within our own borders. On the front page of Dkos today:
But the temporary worker program has nothing to do with building American families and American dreams. Under the program, 400,000-600,000 guest workers would enter the country every year on two-year visas. Although the visas can be renewed twice, recipients would be denied any path to permanent residency or citizenship. In fact, the guest workers would be precluded from even applying for permanent residency while here on temporary visas.
-snip-
And those employers won't have to pay their new indentured servants any more than the minimum wage. See, unlike the existing H-2B visa -- the visa that governs most "unskilled" temporary workers in the US today -- the proposed temporary worker program contains no requirements that employers pay their temporary help the federally determined "prevailing wage" for their occupation and the geographic area. Today, if a contractor can't find an qualified electrician to work on a project in Chicago, the contractor can apply for an H-2B visa. But the contractor is required to pay any foreign electrician entering the US on the H-2B no less than $53.57 per hour, including benefits. That's the prevailing wage for an electrician in Chicago, according to the Department of Labor. And by requiring H-2B sponsors to pay their foreign help the prevailing wage, the H-2B program limits the ability of employers to use guest workers as a tool to undermine wage markets. The proposed temporary worker plan changes all that.
Under the proposed plan, there is no wage floor. If the Chicago contractor can't find an electrician in the US to work on his project for $20 per hour, he can import a temporary worker who will. The result will be a swift collapse of wage markets in many industries populated by skilled non-professional workers, like construction. And all of a sudden, we'll be hearing that the work of an electrician is one of those "jobs Americans won't do," like fruit picking. The truth, of course, is that there is no job that an American won't do for the right price. But by creating a steady flow of temporary workers with no ability to stay in the country for more than a couple years, and no practical ability to fight for better wages, the number of jobs that "Americans won't do" will grow dramatically. And they include a host of the jobs that sustain and nourish the middle class. The construction trades. Cosmetology. Culinary arts. These are jobs that take years to master, and consequently pay quite well, because not just anybody can do them. But by busting open the labor markets for these jobs, and opening them with no restrictions to folks from countries with much lower costs of living, we will strangle the middle class lives of the millions of Americans who have proudly earned their paychecks with their skills.
The right uses latent xenophobia to justify their opposition to the immigration bill. I, like many on the left, am all for a path to citizenship, and I don't care if you call it amnesty. Amnesty International is a good group, after all; why smear the word? In my experience, immigrants are among the hardest working, law abiding people living in this country. Anyone who wants to work hard and better themselves should be able to.
Of course, there's the sticky issue of how immigrants impact the labor market for native born workers. Studies show that they help create a lot of economic wealth and give rise to industries that might not exist if not for their labor. It's true that the poor and working class pour so much of their paychecks back into the economy. But it's also true that under the table workers drive down wages for everyone else.
So the solution? Letting immigrants work, too, but not for the wages they currently get paid. Make all employers prove their workers are legal and they aren't running under the table poverty payrolls. Stop the exploitation of immigrant workers, while evening the playing field for native born workers.
There's been some disagreement about the current immigration bill within the labor movement... which I will talk more about tomorrow
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