A different world
Today comes news that teachers in Carlisle, Pa., have voted to go on strike rather than submit to a demand by the school board that they pay one-quarter of the cost of their health insurance. They pay nothing now, which is how it was for nearly all workers 15 years ago. Similarly, teachers in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, are fighting attempts by the school board there to move them into an inferior health plan to save money.
It's happening everywhere. The main issue in the contract negotiations between my union, The Newspaper Guild, and the Patriot-News is health insurance. The company demands that we pay one-third of the cost of our premiums, which would mean several hundred dollars a month for family coverage and would likely force a few people into bankruptcy. Publisher John Kirkpatrick used this as a cynical tool to induce a decertification vote to throw out our union. The vote will take place on June 2. He made clear for months that while union members would have to pay these onerous sums, non-union departments at the newspaper would continue to pay nothing. Now he's furiously backpedaling on that "pledge" to the non-reps, as they're known here, saying they'll likely have to pay something as well.
What a different world we live in than 15 years ago. A generation of business executives has come to power which sees health insurance as merely a cost item on the balance sheet, not a moral responsibility to their employees. They look at the books, and if they screwed up somewhere else, they try to squeeze it out of employee wages and benefits to make up for it. Cutting health insurance or forcing employees to pay more and more of the premium cost has become a manhood test for too many business executives. We in the newsroom at the Patriot-News report the news every day and do it well. This weekend, many of us, including me, will receive awards from our peers for our work last year. But if management can't bring the new printing plant in on time, or goes off on a half-baked crusade to publish a compact edition of the paper that almost no one wanted, or can't persuade advertisers that we are the place to be, that's not our fault. Yet we are being asked, in effect, to pony up for the losses.
What a different world this would be if America had a Canadian-style health system--which no matter what propaganda you hear, is very popular in Canada--or if the Clinton health plan had not been shouted down by Republicans and the insurance lobby in 1994. This is tearing the country apart and ruining American economic competitiveness.