so why won't Stern get behind HR 676? (0.00 / 0)

Stern pointed out that the cost of health care is easily demonstrated by going across the border from Michigan to Canada, and that health care is now an issue that is crippling our international competitiveness.

why is he hanging around with HCAN't?

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by: AliceDem @ Wed Nov 19, 2008 at 20:10:40 PM UTC

And yet again, the chickens come home to roost. (4.00 / 1)

The history of health care in America is a history of gross corporate incompetence and a decline in both the power and the vision of most union leaders. As William Pfaff noted in a review of a book by the vile Roger Lowenstein, UAW head Walter Reuther foresaw exactly how the health benefits he'd won for union members would eventually damage their employers:

United Auto Workers leader  Walter Reuther urged the automobile manufacturers instead to join the UAW in demanding from the government the kind of agreements that were being made in Europe, by which the state assumed responsibility for universal health care and retirement protection for all citizens.

If business had accepted Reuther's proposals, a federal welfare system would necessarily have been funded from taxes, as in Europe. In that case Lowenstein could have written his book today on how "taxes ruined General Motors," etc., and gone on to deplore that business had not been allowed the freedom in the 1950s to negotiate its own wages and pensions agreements with the unions.

General Motors and the other automakers, with corporate America generally, condemned Reuther's proposals as calling for a "socialized welfare state." Instead GM signed its individual contract with the UAW, and in subsequent years applied an equivalently "self-destructive" logic to wage negotiations with the unions. Rather than pay more, the company chose to increase worker benefits. In 1961, for example, it offered only a 2.5 percent wage increase, making it acceptable by simultaneously guaranteeing a 12 percent rise in pensions. It did not want to pay today, and the union unwisely accepted GM's promise to pay tomorrow.

Tomorrow has arrived, and General Motors, seconded by much of corporate America, and by Roger Lowenstein, would like to be allowed to welsh on its promises.

It is still stunning to rediscover time after time the long reign of damn fools over our national fortune. It's also very hard now to work up any sympathy for the unbroken chain of fools that is now whining to be bailed out of its own soiled nest.

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by: DaveW @ Wed Nov 19, 2008 at 21:08:13 PM UTC

Stern regime is corrupt and dictatorial (0.00 / 0)

SEIU is flush with money so much of the leftist blogosphere lines up to suck up to him, while turning a blind eye to the crushing of union democracy, the imposition of corrupt cronies on trusteed locals and the sell-out contracts that ban strikes and even criticism of "partner" corporations.

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by: JimmyHiggins @ Thu Nov 20, 2008 at 01:56:33 AM UTC