Post by rmarks1 on Sept 14, 2013 12:21:46 GMT -5
Sometimes I think the news is scripted by sitcom writers.
Bob Marks
Well played, Mr. President. Last week, prior to the big AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, President Obama personally spoke to AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, asking him to water down several anti-Obamacare resolutions that union leaders were planning to pass there. Trumka obliged, keeping calls to repeal Obamacare out of the official AFL-CIO resolution on the health law. Then, on Friday evening, after the convention was over, the Obama administration revealed that it would ignore unions’ demands to subsidize their members using Obamacare. As a result, some unions fear that they will wither away. “I guarantee you by your next convention four years from now, you won’t meet a quarter of this room,” said Joseph Nigro, president of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Union. “We won’t be here.”
Unions have long known that a major reason that people join unions—and thereby a major source of their income and power—comes from their role as the middleman who negotiates health benefit plans with employers. If the government offered health insurance directly to workers, workers would have much less need to unionize....
The problem is that, thanks to Obamacare’s employer mandate and its subsidized insurance exchanges, businesses with fewer than 50 employees now have an incentive to drop health coverage for their employees and let those workers get coverage on the exchanges. It’s a better deal for those workers, and a better deal for their employers. But it’s a big blow to the labor unions who organize the plans, because workers no longer need unions to negotiate or obtain their health coverage....
Over time, however, unions came to see government-sponsored health coverage as a way to expand the coalition of progressive voters who supported a more expansive government generally. And so unions got on board with Obamacare, and fought hard for its passage and for Obama’s re-election.
The great irony—one that union leaders are only now starting to recognize—is that by doing so, they’ve accelerated their own demise, at least in the private sector. Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers are unionized. That number will continue to decline as workers realize they don’t need unions for their health benefits. The labor movement will increasingly become comprised of public-sector unions, giving it a far different character than it has today.
www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/14/obama-to-labor-unions-multi-employer-health-plans-drop-dead/
Unions have long known that a major reason that people join unions—and thereby a major source of their income and power—comes from their role as the middleman who negotiates health benefit plans with employers. If the government offered health insurance directly to workers, workers would have much less need to unionize....
The problem is that, thanks to Obamacare’s employer mandate and its subsidized insurance exchanges, businesses with fewer than 50 employees now have an incentive to drop health coverage for their employees and let those workers get coverage on the exchanges. It’s a better deal for those workers, and a better deal for their employers. But it’s a big blow to the labor unions who organize the plans, because workers no longer need unions to negotiate or obtain their health coverage....
Over time, however, unions came to see government-sponsored health coverage as a way to expand the coalition of progressive voters who supported a more expansive government generally. And so unions got on board with Obamacare, and fought hard for its passage and for Obama’s re-election.
The great irony—one that union leaders are only now starting to recognize—is that by doing so, they’ve accelerated their own demise, at least in the private sector. Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers are unionized. That number will continue to decline as workers realize they don’t need unions for their health benefits. The labor movement will increasingly become comprised of public-sector unions, giving it a far different character than it has today.
www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/14/obama-to-labor-unions-multi-employer-health-plans-drop-dead/
Bob Marks
