Union members at General Electric staged a two-day strike to protest higher health care costs imposed by the company.

Last January's two-day walkout by GE workers signaled growing conflict over health care issues at bargaining tables across the country.

"Rapidly rising costs are making health care the biggest hurdle in contract negotiations," said IAM Strategic Resources Director Steve Sleigh. "Employers want to pass on higher costs to employees. We want solutions that preserve the tradition of company-paid health benefits for union-represented employees."

That calls for innovative approaches to work with employers to cut costs and fighting for legislative changes to the nation's health care system.

"Double-digit increases for health care can't go on forever," said IAM President Tom Buffenbarger. "We know it. Employers know it. America needs a new health care system where every employer pays their fair share and every working family gets health coverage."

IAM members stiffly resist companies who merely want to shift health care costs to employees. At Lockheed Martin Corporation in Fort Worth, Texas, IAM members went on strike for two weeks over Lockheed's brazen attempt to shift benefit costs.

"Lockheed posted a $500 million profit last year. Yet, they ignored our proposals to work together to cut health benefit costs. They just demanded that employees pay more,"said Aerospace Coordinator John Crowdis. "Our members stood up and said no."

Lockheed backed off its demand that employees pay up to 40 percent of a prescription drug's cost with no cap on the amount. "The cap was crucial," said Pat Lane, District 776 President and Directing Business Representative. "We had to control how much prescription drugs would cost our members."

New, More Cooperative Alternatives
Unaffordable cost increases can be avoided. The IAM seeks to reduce health care costs by improving the quality of the health care provided to employees (see accompanying article p. 20) and pooling purchasing power to win larger discounts for services and prescription drugs.

This innovative approach worked at Local S/6 in Bath, Maine. After a strike in 2000, Bath Iron Works wanted to raise the HMO family premium from $40 to $200 per month. But, by implementing the union's quality initiatives, members pay $50 - a $150 savings over Bath's first proposal.

At United Parcel Service, three thousand members worked under twenty-one agreements, many with different benefit levels. "We knew we had to do something different," said Automotive Department Director Boysen Anderson.  "A National Agreement allowed us to focus our economic power on larger issues such as health care." The new contract combines locals into a large purchasing pool that allows them to replace local separate indemnity plans with a UPS National Plan. The larger UPS plan provides full coverage for many preventive services such as routine physicals and cancer screening that were out-of pocket expenses under the old indemnity plans. The UPS National plan also increases the lifetime maximum for retiree medical benefits from $50,000 in some of the local plans to $500,000.

Working for Real Change
Quality initiatives and innovative approaches can only go so far. "The deck is stacked against employer-based health benefits as long as coverage is voluntary," said Buffenbarger. "Employers who provide good coverage end up subsidizing and competing against corporate pirates like Wal-Mart who don't provide any coverage for their workers."

Rising premiums means more and more employers, must drop coverage to survive. That means employers still offering health insurance face price hikes for benefits, and the spiral starts again.

"A system of national health care where every working family has a right to health insurance and every employer has to pay their fair share is a way out," said Buffenbarger.

More than 5.2 million Californians have no health insurance, yet they belong to a working family.

"Employers simply aren't stepping up and providing coverage," said District 190 Directing Business Representative Jim Beno. "We're backing a bill in the state legislature, S.B. 2, that enables employers to either provide health insurance or at least pay into a statewide pool to cover workers without insurance."

The "Health Care for Working Families" proposal lets employers who provide health insurance continue to do so.

Employers who don't offer coverage will pay a fee into the state Employment Development Department to provide a basic health plan for uninsured workers who meet minimum earnings requirements.

"In our area we represent a lot of automotive technicians plus machine and manufacturing workers. With health care costs rising so fast, it's harder to negotiate a decent contract when competitors aren't paying anything," said Beno. "We'd love to see a 'Single Payer' system, but that's just not in the cards right now. The Health Care for Working Families bill is a good start to covering the uninsured and relieving our employers from unfair competition. It's just basic justice."

For more information about California's health care bill, go to www.healthcareforworkingfamilies.org and for information about a similar measure in Wisconsin go to www.wisaflcio.org.

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