www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, NOVEMBER 2003Workshop TalksStrikes for healthby Htun Lin In Los Angeles County, 15,000 grocery workers went on strike at Vons. Then Kroger and Albertsons locked out their 49,000 employees. At the same time, Los Angeles transit workers struck, like the grocery workers, primarily over health care. Last year another million American workers lost their health insurance, adding to the 43 million who already had no insurance. "This battle is growing nationwide," said Greg Denier, director of communications for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the union that represents the grocery workers. "What's happening is that contracts are up across the country in different areas. The employers are dedicated to eliminating affordable health care for employees, so the national health care crisis is being played out on the picket line. "Rick Icaza, president of UFCW Local 770, said, 'They're talking about cutting our benefits in half. This could mean the loss of vision coverage, dental, even pension benefits. That's how draconian this is.'" The companies also are demanding a two-tier wage system. One UFCW member said this would be used to get rid of the old-timers. Well, he doesn't have to speculate. At Kaiser, the HMO where I work, the union allowed two-tier to come in after an eight-week strike. Gradually, the whole place was re-engineered to replace those on the first tier with newer second tier employees. While Los Angeles workers are fighting the loss of health insurance, and dramatic increases in their co-pays and deductibles, for us health care workers that crisis and ongoing battle is also played out daily in the hospital wards and clinics. Where I work, collecting co-pays, called "revenue recovery rate," has become the criterion for judging a worker's performance. We used to be able to bid on jobs at Kaiser based on seniority. Now seniority gets you considered as one of several candidates. Some with decades of experience get turned down based on co-payment collection. Employees are pressured daily to bring the numbers up, telling us that our jobs depend on this. Reports of not meeting other criteria, some mandated by state and federal regulations, fall on deaf ears. Even after a recent warning, which came after a surprise inspection by the State Department of Health, they continue to neglect sorely needed improvements in areas related to patient care. They bemoan how they are under so much pressure from outside competition. To our managers this is merely adjusting to reality--the economy out there. What's out there for the grocery employers is Wal-Mart, the "big bad wolf" in this current labor conflict. The companies demanding concessions are pointing to non-unionized Wal-Mart. However, Wal-Mart imports most of its products from countries like China. Hundreds of millions of uprooted peasantry now flock to the city slums of China, looking for work, any kind of work, forced to accept nearly prison-labor wages and no labor rights under China's brutal state-capitalists. Every American manufacturer is now of the mind that they have to compete with China's totalitarian production system. VANISHING BORDERS The "new millennium's new economy" has eerie traces of the horrible conditions of the last century's production floor. The world of global production had always been divided into at least two tiers. Those in the upper tier were hi-tech industrial societies like ours with higher wages and salaries. Those in the lower tier were impoverished developing nations. The two tiers had largely been separated by national borders, which have begun to vanish under the latest phase of capital's global restructuring. Often our own unions accept our bosses' arguments, telling us our jobs and the company's survival depend on it. Our union contracts, and everything else we won previously through collective bargaining become undermined. What binds American production to Chinese production, or Indian or Indonesian, in this new global production regimen is what ties all of them together--turning labor power into commodities and humans into mere cogs in the machine to be discarded when criteria set by machines compel it. Grocery employers in LA are working together in this latest class war. Capitalists say whatever hit they take from these strikes it is worth it as an "investment in the future." It is time we workers, who know from our everyday working lives the insanity of this inverted thinking and whose labor makes everything possible, show the power of solidarity in this permanent war of capital on our hard won right to health care. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
