Union Members in Private Sector now Outnumbered by Public Sector
In a post that has sparked a new round of union bashing, the Washington Post notes that union membership continues to decline, at least outside of government. For the first time the number of union members in government jobs is larger than the number in private industry.
But check out the comments… and we’re sure some of our regulars will have something to add in rebuttal to the bashers.
What did you expect in a forum under “Right matters”? More right -wing conservative anti-Union blather that doesn’t matter.
But it does matter. You hear something enough times you’ll begin to believe it.
It’s not so much what the unions stood for ,It’s what they have become
For themselves reather than the members , pushing stupid things not associated for the good of the members..as in the Health care “non crisis” and global warming crap(like we have the power to regulate the sun)
Okay, David, I’m not getting you at all. Are you saying there is no Health Care crises in this country? And you seriously believe that our behavior has nothing to do do with the change in weather? If that’s what you are saying, I can;t believe you are a unionist anyway. I don’t even believe you are a thinker. Really.
Just step back slowly, Greg. Do NOT make eye contact.
“for themselves”? Look, I’m a skeptic on global warming, but I have no doubt a great many people of good will disagree with me, and I find it difficult to think union leaders aren’t among their numbers and, additionally, don’t think it is in the best interest of their members as well, both as humans and as union members (gad awful run-on there). The infrastructure improvements required alone must make that point.
And, while this next might seem tangential or worse, I don’t see it that way –God Bless George Meany and the AFL-CIO as absolute bulwarks in the fight against communism when it mattered most, from the same kind of combined concerned of human interest and the interest of free, prosperous, and empowered unions and union members.
Uh….I think maybe moving a zillion industry jobs overseas might have had something to do with it. Another way of saying it – unions organize more successfully among the jobs not outsourced overseas – which are service and government.
Conservatives began their movemement against unions during the Nixon administration. Just like their successful campaign against liberal politics, they began to marginalize and demonize unions by introducing what I call the “Big Scary Lies;” unions are corrupt, unions are anti-free trade, unions weaken competition, union workers are lazy but make more money, and my personal favorite, union workers are less competent than their non-union brethren. All of these lies by themselves are laughable, and demonstrably false. But taken together and repeated frequently enough, they have proven to be successful in “educating” two generations of Americans against organized labor.
Now let’s add odious business practices like outsourcing (which artificially depresses hourly and midline wages by reducing workforce demand)and deregulation (which releases restrictions on questionable business and financial practices). Throw in employment agreements that forces workers to give up their ability to litigate against the corporation for unfair treatment or unsafe working conditions, and require workers to accept mandatory arbitration, the results of which are legally binding.
Politically depress minimum wages and tell scary stories how raising minimum wages force businesses to pass on costs to the customer (a complete fallacy, btw. The only reason a company does that is to maintain it’s profit margin). Giving specific industries permission via law, not to pay minimum wage as long as tipped compensation is involved (waitstaff in most states still make 2.13 per hour and must rely on tips to survive). Artificially lower the poverty line to make it appear as though these criminally low wages are sufficient pay.
Don’t get me started on the criminal behavior of corporations as far as actually following OSHA laws, granting sick/bereavement leave to employees, and other social justice issues within the workplace. This sickening race to the bottom allows employers to profit short term. Of course, turnover is increased, so companies can hold down wages even more. The working class in the US is on the verge of working itself to death…all because some idiot named Milton Friedman said the free market cures all ills. Indentured servitude is really not that far away and wage slavery is in full swing.
The weaker unions are in the private sector, the more corporations may abuse workers…and politicians have had forty years to dismantle the good work unions did to level the playing field. No, unions are not perfect, but they are far better than the alternative of relying on the largesse of senior corporate managers/officers and lawmakers to do what is right and pay a genuinely competitive, living to employees, compensate them with good health care benefits, give them paid vacation so they remain healthy and productive, and pay a good retirement.
~JC
David,
I’d say you’re pretty right on. The health care “crisis” was created by the government more than anything else. I would like government to get it’s greedy, sticky fingers out of our wallets and get rid of much of its regulations of the health care industry and on other businesses as well. That would go a long way toward creating competition and helping people get decent health care who don’t have it but want it.
Whenever the state gets involved in our lives our standard of life goes down. This is true with little or no exceptions.
Tax cuts on our industry, our employers and us are in order. Yet right now we have a tax and spend president and congress. That hurts us a great deal. Yet Unions support those politicians that hurt us the most.
Bluntly put, unions tend to be very stupid.
As far as global warming goes, what a better way for government to have an excuse to regulate and control our lives. Politicians love exercising their power by telling us how to live, what kind of car to drive, what kind of toilet to flush, where we can explore for energy sources and on and on. And the Unions just support it without question. And much of the population follows like a flock of sheep. All this while we freeze to death listening to Al Gore’s pap.
@JC:
EXCELLENT comment! May I have permission to print this for others to read?
Absolutely.
“The health care “crisis” was created by the government more than anything else.”
I guess you must’ve missed this story in today’s LA Times:
“Anthem Blue Cross dramatically raising rates for Californians with individual health policies Policyholders are incensed over rate hikes of as much as 39%, which they say come on top of similar increases last year. State insurance regulators say they’ll investigate.”
39 PERCENT!!!??? Must’ve been those damned union nurses who caused it, huh?
OK, so you don’t believe in trade unionism, democratic government, or observable scientific phenomena – why are you posting here? Shouldn’t you be off teabagging somewhere?
David,
If you don’t like insurance companies charging exorbitant rates then get the government out of regulating them. It’s the government that makes laws that disallow a person to get health insurance across sate lines, thus limiting competition, and thereby allowing companies to jack up their rates.
If you want to lower the costs of insurance then vote those into power who want to limit the government’s involvement in our health care and in our lives generally.
If you want to know what government health care will be like just walk into your local DMV, stand in line from two to four hours before getting served and then you’ll get an idea what it will be like when Obama controls another 1/6 of the American economy. And once these bureaucrats control your health, they control your life.
Part of your problem may be that you get your “facts” from the LA Times, a rather greasy rag, that deliberately leaves out important facts to slant the news to their own belief system which is very left.
That’s nonsense. Insurance companies charge high rates because of government regulation? Get serious… Buying insurance across state lines won’t do anything for rates any more than electricity deregulation did anything for rates. Are your electric rates lower now than they were before deregulation? No…you just have one more layer of middle managers and Wall Street financiers who get a chunk of your higher bill.
In health insurance there aren’t many companies that work in one state only. In fact I can’t think of any, other than the Blues, that are set up that way.
All you’re doing is spouting psycho-right talking points…come back when you have some real solutions.
I doubt you would know a ‘fact’ if it bit you.
Offhand, the instance I can think of where government regulation does increase insurance rates is the requirement that no one can be turned away from an emergency room. Which in turn causes hospitals to raise their rates to cover that unfunded cost, which in turn gets passed on to the insurance companies and then consumers who do have insurance.
But of course most people would call that a necessity of civilization, and argue for a different solution –requiring basic health care for all to greatly reduce it, and even (gasp) a mandate to have coverage to reduce “free riders” on the system.
As I see it, the real problem with the current initiatives (all the ones with a chance of passage, however slim) is that they are looking at the wrong end of the beast. They focus on who is going to PAY for health care without even considering what that health care COSTS. It is (relatively) easy to pass a bill that says everyone must have health insurance. It is not so easy to make sure the bill can be paid when it comes.
Everyone, from Obama on down, appears to believe that the answer is in creating some entity big and strong enough to negotiate with health care providers to drive costs down. That’s theoretically possible, but the creation of federal or state-run pools, or even letting insurance companies sell across state lines does not eliminate the greatest flaw in the idea. The health care providers can simply shift the costs to someone else.
When I started as a union health fund administator, I ran a fund with 8,000 active participants. Hospitalization coverage was provided through the local Blue. Every year, I looked at a substantial premium raise. The raise was predicated on my group’s experience only. Every year I would sit down with the Blues people and do a line-by-line review of every hospital charge. I got to knock out the bills for anyone who died in the hospital. We referred to these deaths as “non-recurring” incidents; since the person died, they wouldn’t be incurring any more charges, so I shouldn’t have to pay a premium based on them. It sounds a little ghoulish, and it was, but by doing that, I usually cut the premium increase by half. I had several other tricks of the same time and made further reductions.
When the process was over, did Blue Cross lose a penny? Nope. Whatever they lost from my efforts undoubtedly got tacked onto someone else’s bill; maybe somebody who wasn’t as prepared as I was to fight them. This is known as “cost shifting,” and it would thrive under the current bill. All we’re doing is making someone else pick up the tab, without realizing that the “someone else” is still “us,” but as taxpayers rather than health care users. It’s a scam.
Anything short of a universal single-payor system has the same defect. Mandating that I be offered health insurance doesn’t mean I am going to be able to afford it. I have Type 2 Diabetes and this past year I have had a basal cell carcinoma removed. Right now, I have a very expensive plan with a $10,000 deductible that only essentially covers me if I am hit by a comet while standing outside the hospital. My insurer can’t get rid of me because I have these conditions, but they can jack my bill up, so they do. And because I am in a “pool” with other citizens in my state, everyone else’s bill goes up a bit because of my covered expenses. Other insurers can ignore me because of my pre-existing conditions, but I’m not fooling myself into believing that if they were forced to offer me insurance it would be any cheaper than what I’ve got now. I’m no longer in a low-risk group, and my premiums reflect it. Now the current bill in Congress will require other insurers to ignore these prexisting conditions, but it does absolutely nothing to insure that I will be able to afford the premiums they charge me, and there’s nothing in the bill (except the idea of “competition”) to limit how much those premiums go up every year. And, sad to say, those premiums will be justified because the cost of the covered services I received was so high, and is likely to be for years to come.
So, if you have a bunch of 400 pound gorillas selling health insurance at whatever the market will bear, even if you force them to offer insurance to everyone, it doesn’t mean they will be able to buy it, even if you build a 800 pound gorilla to force them to. That’s because the 400 pound gorillas aren’t the real problem.
Health care costs aren’t sky high and growing faster because of profits going to health insurance companies. I took my first Union plan self-insured because I figured I could run the operation cheaper than Blue Cross. I was correct, but I knew, right from the start, that it was a temporary advantage because the costs of the claims themselves continued to climb faster than contribution revenue.
Health care costs are ballooning because of a number of factors unrelated to health insurance. Many of them are related to the profit motive of privately held companies; Big Pharma, the hopsital conglomerates, etc. THESE are the entities that set the costs, not the insurers.
A single payor system would have the clout to negotiate with them. A “Medicare For All” plan could counterbalance the power of the providers by taking the ability to cost shift away, but there are serious flaws in a single payor system. A single payor system eliminates competition among providers by diminishing the importance of the profit motive, but there is a serious downside to that approach. Elimination of competition also greatly eliminates the drive to out-perform your competitors. In terms of health care, this change can be disasterous. Almost every great advance in medicine in the last fifty years has been spurred by competition and the profit motive in the marketplace; in procedures, in equipment, in drugs. Take away the prize, and there’s no incentive to win. In fact, there’s only an incentive to stay even with everyone else. What you get is a system that self-rations health care, and that’s no good for anyone.
And before someone points to Canada as an example of how well a single payor system works with rationed care, they’re going to have to explain away a very problematical fact. As soon as Canada instituted its system, almost every hospital in the US border states (and especially those within a couple hours of major Canadian metropolitan areas) experienced a major surge in surgeries in those categories where there was now a long waiting list in Canada; starting with organ transplants. In short, the US provided a safety valve for the Canadian system; when the pressure got too high, the availability of surgery in the US reduced that pressure.
Now, of course, the people taking advantage of US hospitals were the Canadians who could afford it, so what we’ve ended up with is a two-tier system in Canada; basic care for everyone, and a higher level of care for those who can pay. I don’t think that is what we want here.
And besides that, if we do the same as Canada did, where do our rich folk (and Canada’s) go for those surgeries? Mexico? If you give away your lawnmower, your neighbor can’t borrow it anymore, but you can’t cut your own lawn.
There has to be a better way, some balance between the competing interests. We need to control health care costs without killing the competitive drive that has given us so much cutting-edge innovation.
I wish our representatives would even acknowledge the need to look in that direction, but they’re not. This is why the current “reform” effort is doomed.
My two cents . . .
One factor that drives up health costs is the widespread emergence of new treatments and technologies that offer vastly improved outcomes, but at significant cost compared to the past. This creates a daunting actuarial challenge, because rates based on prior treatments/outcomes/mortality/costs become obsolete. These new treatments and technologies have emerged because there is a market for them, but the question of how to pay for them raises a host of issues that simply cannot be resolved by slogans or simplistic approaches.
VG
Very enlightening, thanks. I also think the bill in Washington is a mess. They’d do more for the average guy to pass one single paragraph bill allowing prescriptions to be filled from Canada and then quit for the year.
End of life care is the big money and what family wants to limit that when it’s Mama? So the meter runs at fantastic rates and huge sums get spent on the dying. Nothing’s going to change there because some of them live a while longer from the amazing technology.
Perhaps our health plans should offer to coordinate and make better use of foreign surgical opportunities. I’m not talking Mexico, I know of one case that was 40% cheaper when done in Belgium, including all transportation and housing. But of course, you’re right, they’ll just shift that cost to someone else. Witness the 39% premium spike in California and a Maine Blue plan costing 23K for an individual with no ‘priors’. How do you pay 23k for a policy when you make 40k? Live in your car? In Maine?
I’m afraid it will all have to crash before we can build a new system from the ash. Our out of work doctors, and bankrupt hospitals will demand it. Even now, my dermatologist says his office is way down and my dentist has his staff ‘on call’. And all those Canadians who rushed down here for surgery? Well, guess where those surgeons learned their trade – on Medicare patients. If they could only work on the rich folks with money, your heart surgeon would be doing his 34th bypass when he cuts you open, instead of his 411th.
Goose, golden egg….something like that.
There’s innovation and there’s over-supply driven by competition too. We have too many MRI machines in this country by any rational metric. You’ve got companies now trying to sell whole-body MRIs as a “preventative procedure”.
This is going to sound a bit odd coming from a lifelong Republican (even if I am of the near-extinct Rockefeller/Javits/Lodge/Kean moderate branch that once roamed the Northeast in legendary herds that spread to the horizon), but if there’s going to be a solution, it is going to require taking the “business” out of the health care business.
Are we ready to declare that all Americans have a right to adequate health care? Should “Freedom From Illness” be granted the same status as “Freedom of Speech?” If that’s where we truly want to go, it is going to take a fundamental change in the priorities we set for ourselves.
Bluntly, I don’t think we’re there yet, and I don’t think we’re even close. Until we’re ready to have that discussion, every solution offered is a half-measure. Maybe the disasters will mount up sufficiently for us to realize there really is a crisis, but we’re not there now.
I have an innate distrust of answers that rely on the government to solve our problems. That’s my Republican DNA still at work. And, as a former bureaucrat, I can honestly say I’ve never met one of my kind I would trust with decisions critical to my family’s well-being. I simply know better. Everything in the plans under discussion now seems designed to crash and burn because the plans glorify process over substance, and substitute wishes for hard decisions. It won’t be the lobbyists or the people who vote on those plans who will pay for the mistake. More’s the pity.
Fred, as unlikely as it may be, if you ever run into science fiction writer G. David Nordley, you can give him the secret “ex-Rocky guys” grip and he’ll recognize it immediately –just so you know, y’all being so rare. . . he worked Rocky’s national campaigns in Minnesota, back in the day.
I post where I want. And you don’t have a say in it, thank goodness.
And yes, Admin, regulations from the government does increase insurance rates in a great number of ways. When there are a limited number of insurance companies in a particular state and the law is you have to use one of those insurance companies, that limits competition, which is a free market concept. Maybe that’s something you don’t believe in.
Tort reform and allowing competition across state lines would lower costs immensely.
The Constitution is based on limited government for a reason. And the mess the State of California is in right now is because it doesn’t believe in that. The entire nation, under the thumb of the Obama Administration is sending the whole country into the same mess California is in. SAG and every other union supports the very same idiot politicians that are causing the financial crisis we find ourselves in.
You think I should support that in the name of solidarity. I think for myself and the mob of nuts does not alter my perceptions.
I know it’s so hard for so many people to comprehend the concept of standing on their own feet without the wonderful government holding their hand and taking care of them. The problem is that the more the government does that, more in debt the nation gets, the more the people become dependent on the government and the more freedom is taken away.
You can whine and snivel all you want about how hard life is and how evil those mean rascally conservatives are. But the day you actually get your way, which hopefully will be never, is the day you start to hate life even more than you do now.
Don’t know about you, but I’m not complaining about life at all.
And your claim about increasing competition is a perfect talking point for the psycho-right. It sounds plausible but actually is meaningless. There already is competition, lots of it. The problem isn’t the supply side, it’s the cost side. No insurance company can survive while charging low rates but paying out huge cost increases to medical providers.
I know it’s so hard for so many people to comprehend simple mathematics, and it’s always a better sound bite to blame government for the ills of the world, but California’s problem isn’t the constitution or people ignoring it, it’s that spending outstripped income.
You can whine and snivel all you want about how bad the current politicians are, but they’re all the same. They promise something for nothing, or sticking the other guy with the bill for the services we want but don’t want to pay for. The difference between the psycho right and the rest of us is that the psycho righties pretend they don’t want the services.
California’s biggest budget problem is for many years they relied on outsized capital gains taxes as if they were a predictable income stream. In the land of Silicon Valley, this worked for a decade or so. . . but inevitably it had to end. This also happened to a somewhat smaller degree Federally, and is why Clinton got himself a few small budget surpluses (that plus Bush, Sr. tax increases he inherited).