Labor Union Blog

The 26th AFL-CIO Convention will make history as delegates elect new leadership for the federation and chart a course for the 21st century union movement.

The convention will be held Sept. 13-17 in Pittsburgh, a city rich in labor history. Building on the incredible success of the union movement’s 2008 political mobilization, delegates will discuss how to maintain momentum and continue to increase the strength of working people.

For some delegates, the work will begin in the days before the convention. In the week prior to the opening gavel, the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), the AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department, the Union Label Department and Pride At Work will hold their conventions in Pittsburgh.

At the State and Local Conference on Sept. 12, state and local leaders will discuss strategies to build the grassroots movement. And four years after the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention passed a landmark resolution on diversity in the union movement, delegates will discuss the progress in making the leadership more inclusive at the AFL-CIO’s Diversity Summit on Sept. 13.

Two items high on the convention agenda are organizing and political action. We will focus on how to build the union movement and how to ensure passage of our top legislative priorities: health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. Delegates will chart out the next steps to ensure that Congress passes both pieces of legislation during this session.

With 47 million Americans lacking access to health care, the union movement has mounted an unprecedented campaign in support of real health care reform that includes a public health insurance option.  At the same time, we are mobilized to pass the most extensive labor law reform in 70 years. A key discussion at the convention will center on how our work will change once the new law is enacted.

We will mark a major transition in the federation by electing new leadership. John Sweeney, who has led the AFL-CIO since 1995, is retiring, and delegates will choose his successor, as well as the other officers and all the Executive Council members.

Ensuring that the new wave of green jobs turns into good jobs will be on the agenda as well. The AFL-CIO is making a strong statement in favor of a green economy by holding its meeting in the David Lawrence Convention Center, the nation’s first all-green center.

Delegates also will participate in eight breakout forums on the economy, green jobs, organizing, politics, the next generation of union leaders, immigrant workers and professional workers.

To prepare for the new challenges facing the union movement, delegates will take up resolutions on the economy, green jobs, public employees, health care, retirement security, safe jobs, immigration reform, diversity in the union movement and women, work and family.

They also will hear a report on and discuss a resolution on the best ways to strengthen our state and local bodies—our grassroots strength. We will look at how the global economy and the worldwide economic crisis are affecting workers around the world.

The Obama administration likely will name Ron Bloom, who heads the White House’s auto task force, to help develop policies to revive the U.S. manufacturing industry, according to reports by Bloomberg News.

The administration wants to create a new position to enable the White House to craft a policy that coordinates trade, labor and tax issues. He would report to Lawrence Summers, the president’s top economic adviser.

Short-sighted U.S. economic policies that encouraged companies to move offshore have created a crisis in manufacturing. Since 2001, some 40,000 U.S. manufacturing plants have closed, resulting in the loss of millions of family-supporting jobs. From 2001 to 2007, some 2.3 million jobs were lost just to the huge U.S. trade deficit with China.

Bloom is uniquely qualified for the position. Before moving to his present post, he was an assistant to United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard. As USW’s director of corporate research, he helped revive and restructure 50 companies in bankruptcy.

Hired by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney when he was president of SEIU, Bloom began his career negotiating union contracts for low-wage workers.

Bloom has an MBA from Harvard and experience as a vice president at the investment banking firm Lazard Freres & Co., as well as with his own firm, Keilin and Bloom. While at the USW, Bloom’s restructuring plans were recognized for preserving thousands of manufacturing jobs and health care benefits for workers and retirees.

Here’s more evidence why health care reform and controlling soaring health care costs is so desperately needed to help working families.

In Indiana, for example, between 2000 and 2009, the cost of a family health care premium provided by an employer increased 116.6 percent, but working families’ median income rose just 14.9 percent. In Pennsylvania, premiums were up 95.2 cent and income 17.5 percent.

Similar figures are repeated in state after state, according to a new study by Families USA.

But here’s the kicker: All that extra money going to the insurance companies isn’t buying more coverage. Benefits have been reduced and workers are paying higher deductibles and co-pays.

Says Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA:

Rising health care costs threaten the financial well-being of families across the nation. If health care reform does not happen soon, more and more families will be priced out of the health coverage they used to take for granted.

The study also finds that between 2000 and 2008, the total percentage of U.S. firms offering health coverage declined by 6 percentage points—from 69 percent of firms to 63 percent—with small businesses being the most likely to drop coverage. The report warns:

The combination of stagnant wages and rising health care costs is placing a growing strain on family budgets, and many families have reached a breaking point. Quite simply, America’s families are being priced out of health coverage.

Click here for state-by-state figures.

As Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), points out, the United States is the only industrialized nation in which health care is not a fundamental right, “but bartered for profit by a maze of corporations.”

The result is about 45 million Americans with no health coverage and tens of millions more denied medical care because their insurer won’t pay for it.

In a column for the London Times website, Times Online, she says the current debate raging in the United States “must seem incomprehensible to many in the UK.”

Union members continue to take grassroots action for health care reform, mobilizing yesterday in California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, North Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia at congressional town hall meetings and other events.

You can join the debate, help counter the lies being spread and show that there is strong public support for health care reform. Visit our friends at Health Care for America Now! (HCAN!) and enter your ZIP code in the Take Auction in August box to find a town hall meeting or other event in your area.

Another group of leading scholars has added its name to the coalition in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. At its August meeting, the American Sociological Association (ASA) adopted a resolution asking that Congress protect workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

The ASA resolution, representing the consensus of the ASA’s 14,000 members, declares the freedom to form unions must be guaranteed by law. The statement reads, in part:

When employers violate the right of workers to form a union, everyone suffers; wages fall, race and gender pay gaps widen, workplace discrimination increases and job safety standards disappear….

We urge Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to help rebuild the middle class and invigorate an ailing economy by protecting America’s employees’ freedom to choose for themselves whether or not to form a union and provide them with the opportunity to improve their economic situation.

The coalition supporting the Employee Free Choice Act includes a wide array of academic support, such as hundreds of leading economists—several of whom are Nobel Prize winners—hundreds of historians and business professors and more than 1,000 professors and experts across a wide variety of disciplines and institutions, as well as scholars from the United Kingdom and Canada. They join civil rights groups, environmentalists, faith groups and more in demanding the passage of new labor law that restores a workers’ freedom to bargain.

When Congress returns to work in September, one of its first items of business should be extending the federal unemployment benefits for the 640,000 jobless workers due to run out of benefits at the end of September and the 1.5 million more who will lose their jobless benefits by the end of the year.

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director Bill Samuel said that July’s 0.1 percent drop in unemployment occurred only because some 450,000 gave up looking for work and dropped out of the workforce.

The July unemployment rate is still at a horrible 9.4 percent. A more accurate picture of the nation’s jobless crisis includes workers forced to take part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work and discouraged workers who’ve given up finding a job. That figure is 16 percent.

The outlook for the jobless finding work is grim. Samuel noted that there are

fewer jobs in our economy than in 2000, even though the labor force has grown by 12 million since then, and six unemployed workers are now competing for every job opening. Most experts predict the ranks of the unemployed will continue rising over the coming months and throughout next year.

The number of long-term unemployed—those who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks—stands at 5 million. Samuel urged Congress to provide an additional 10 weeks of unemployment benefits to workers and all states and up to an additional 10 weeks for workers in states with unemployment at 11 percent or higher.

Fortunately, doing the right thing for jobless workers also happens to be good for the economy as a whole. Every dollar spent on unemployment benefits generates $2.11 in economic activity—the greatest impact of any stimulus proposal other than increasing food stamps. We urge Congress to take action immediately to keep workers from running out of benefits and to further stimulate the economy.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney (second from left) met with city and union leaders in San Francisco, where a health care public option plan works well for working families.

Steve Smith, director of communications at the California Labor Federation, highlights a real-life example of public option at work.

For most working families, the idea of a health care public option is just a notion. But in San Francisco, it’s reality. And it works.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney joined San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, California Labor Federation Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski and San Francisco Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson at City Hall yesterday to urge Congress to pass health care reform with a strong public option, touting the success of the city’s universal health care system.

The “Healthy San Francisco” program, which was passed with critical support from labor, is a one-of-a-kind example of a public option of health insurance. Low-income workers are able to access subsidized health insurance while those with higher incomes are given an option to buy into a public health insurance option at reduced costs than they would face in the private market.

In fact, because of “Healthy San Francisco,” 75 percent of those in the city who were previously uninsured now have health coverage. San Francisco’s program exemplifies how a public option can effectively cover the uninsured and create choice and competition in the insurance market without negatively impacting job growth.

Congress can gain valuable insight into what a future public health care option nationally might accomplish by looking at the example of San Francisco’s first-in-the-nation universal health care system.

Mayor Newsom:

Even those who fight reform cannot deny that our present health care system is broken. It is inefficient, unfair and enormously costly. A public plan can work. San Francisco is proving it by driving down costs, improving access to care and creating competition.

According to Sweeney, a national public option is essential because it will create choice for workers and competition for private insurers, which will drive down costs and give more people access to quality care.

The bottom line is that people have to realize it’s us against the giant insurance companies—we have to insist that Congress hold them accountable and put patients and our doctors in charge of health care.

The need for health insurance reform is especially acute in California, said Pulaski, citing recent budget cuts that are likely to add significantly to the rolls of the uninsured and underinsured.

What’s currently a health care crisis in California is about to turn into a full-blown epidemic. The governor’s recent budget cuts decimate vital services for California families. Those who need care the most—seniors, the disabled, pregnant women and children—are even more vulnerable now.

Despite the rhetoric from some business groups that a public health care program would lead to job loss, San Francisco’s experience with a public option shows otherwise, said Ken Jacobs of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Based on the most recently available data, as of December 2008 there is no indication that San Francisco employment grew slower surrounding counties.

The San Francisco experiment is working well. The public option has proved popular with individuals and employers alike, while not displacing the private market.  And the employer requirement has not led to the job losses that many feared. These are important lessons for the national debate.