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Since October 11, over 70,000 grocery workers have been on strike or locked out in southern California. The fight is over the employers' demand to slash healthcare coverage.
Safeway and the other supermarket employers claim they just want workers to pay $5 to $15 of their monthly premiums, but their proposals would effectively eliminate worker health care benefits!
How? Until the strike and lockout, the employers paid into a health care benefits fund about $4 for each hour worked. Now they want to create a two-tier system, with one benefits fund for new hires and another for current employees. The fund for new hires would be capped at $1.35 for each hour worked by these lower-tier workers, which isn't enough to pay for any real benefits. The fund for upper-tier workers would be under-funded, since the employers would no longer have to pay into it for the hours worked by the younger, healthier workers (whose health costs are lower). Within three years, according to actuarial analysis, current employees would face massive benefit cuts or unbearable co-payments -- up to nearly $100 a week.
Many workers without a union to protect them have no benefits to lose. Many businesses offer no health coverage at all, or require co-payments only the best-paid employees can afford. Unemployed workers must completely exhaust their savings to qualify for MediCal. Even many workers with good health coverage are stuck in jobs they hate, because they fear losing their health insurance if they leave.
These are the consequences of job-based health care.
Health care in the United States is primarily an employment benefit through an accident of history. During the Second World War, there was a labor shortage at a time of wage and price controls. Employers could recruit needed workers only by offering better benefits. After the war, tax benefits made it cheaper for employers to pay for workers' health care than to give the same amount as a raise, so such benefits became widespread during the postwar period.
Meanwhile, other industrial countries moved to publicly-funded health care systems which covered everyone. This lowered overall costs through preventive medicine and centralized health statistics, which made it possible to detect widespread health problems early on.
With European and Asian rivals challenging US economic dominance, capitalist businesses see American workers less as assets to invest in than as expenses to control. At the same time, health care costs have spiraled as a result of for-profit health providers and medical technology driven by drug companies. Employee health benefits are under constant attack.
The Peace & Freedom Party believes that access to quality medical and dental care is a basic human right. We need a democratically-controlled, publicly-funded health care system.
A good first step is a Canadian-style "single-payer" health care system, which would replace all private health insurance with a single, publicly-funded health insurance program. That's why we have endorsed Senate Bill 921, currently before the California legislature.
However, all for-profit health care needs to be eliminated, not just for-profit health insurance, so we call for a publicly-run health care system (such as, for example, the British National Health Service). As long as profit controls major decisions about health care, no one's health is safe.
[Dave Kadlecek is Alameda County Chair of the Peace and Freedom Party.]
This piece was accompanied by two photographs by Ron Hoffman. The first
showed a woman with her two young children. The woman holds a picket sign
that says "Stop Safeway", while a baby sits in the baby carriage and the
slightly older daughter holds a placard "Corporate Greed vs. Human Need --
Save our healthcare!". This photo is captioned:
Their fight is our fight. The southern California grocery
workers are in a battle for health rights which affects all of us. The
grocery chains are bringing in professional strikebreakers to steal their
jobs while "our" elected officials look the other way.
The second photo shows a demonstration at a Safeway store. Numerous picket signs, too small to read, are visible, and a UFCW banner reading "Hold the Line for America's Health Care" and an Inland Boatmen's Union standard, while a Safeway logo on a store is in the background.
To support the UFCW workers, send your donations to:
UFCW State Council Strike Fund
P O Box 5158
Buena Park, CA 90620
Boycott Safeway, Von's, Ralph's, Kroger's and Albertson's.
Come out to help picket and shut down these stores.
After this story was published, the UFCW reached a tentative agreement with the grocery store chains which was ratified by the membership on February 29th. The strike, lockout and boycotts are now over.
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