By James Spinosa
ILWU International President
The living standards of working people in the U.S., Canada and, for that matter, the whole world, are being slashed, macheted back to the 19th century. Real wages—adjusted for inflation—are easily calculated and undeniably declining for the last 30 years. Health care coverage is becoming a luxury beyond the reach of an increasing portion of the U.S. population. But perhaps the most insidious thievery of workers’ wealth is the ever-expanding robbery of workers’ pensions and retirees’ health care coverage.
Employers are always looking for ways to cut costs and those decisions are usually made on the basis of efficacy and efficiency—what they can get away with the most easily. Rarely do issues of morality factor in. Even legal, contractual obligations are viewed as just another hurdle to get over. They may have to buy some lawyers or politicians, but that’s usually doable and cost effective.
So when employers look around for weak links in the chains restraining their profits, they are turning more and more to retirees. They figure if unions are having harder times defending their active and dues-paying members, how much easier a target are retired workers? It’s not like they can strike or otherwise take economic action against the company. They are usually not organized and often geographically scattered after leaving their jobs. In the heartless landscape of corporate board rooms, they are almost too tempting a target to turn down.
We can see this corporate debt dumping in many ways. For instance, in the once mighty U.S. steel industry, companies that had good contracts negotiated with the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) are declaring bankruptcy and dropping their pension payment obligations on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the government agency set up to insure long-term pension funds. But the PBGC is so overwhelmed by such cases, and so few companies are contributing to its fund these days (as employers move increasingly to 401(k) retirement plans if any at all) that the PBGC is capable of paying only pennies on the dollar. Other steel companies are “going out of business” and selling their plants to new companies. The old ones assert there is no longer any entity to pay the claims and the new ones argue they never signed onto any such obligations. With a wink and a nod from Congress and the courts, long-planned retirement security disappears into the black hole of corporate greed.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union is apparently next in line. Recently General Motors has planted stories in the New York Times and other national media claiming that $1,500 of every car it sells goes to cover both current and retired worker’s health care. The subtext of these stories is that these costs are untenable in today’s competitive market and that they will drive GM out of business. This is the beginning of the company’s propaganda campaign to blame the crisis of its profitability on the workers who built GM. The solution? Certainly not build better cars with better gas mileage. No, it’s dump health care coverage.
And then there’s Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, a transparent scheme to put all workers’ basic retirement savings at risk so Wall Street investment firms can make a killing. And in California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to outlaw defined benefit pensions (similar to the ILWU longshore pension plan) for state employees and then privatize their plans so he can cut corporate taxes further to make the state more “business friendly.”
These pensions are something we bargained for, something we gave up immediate wage increases to have in the future. They are in fact back pay we are owed. Yet through laws and regulations promulgated by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress corporations are being allowed to declare bankruptcy and renege on their contractual obligations to provide their former workers with pensions and health care. At the same time, Bush and the Republican Congress are in the process of passing new laws that will make it more difficult for individuals to go bankrupt (half of all individual bankruptcies are caused by catastrophic medical expenses that should be covered by health insurance) without paying their debts to businesses. The Republicans are shameless—they don’t even try to hide the class warfare that guides their policies.
The labor movement is trying to fight off all these assaults for its members and all workers. Few issues are more important.
It is in old age and retirement that health care is most important. Having medical and prescription coverage is often the difference between poverty and comfort, between life and death. Having retirement paychecks you can count on is the difference between stress and security, between shame and dignity. They allow retired workers to stay active, to have the time and energy to give back to their communities.
The long-term solution to the health care crisis is, of course, a national, single-payer system with controls on profits and prices. It is almost unfathomable how the health care industry, which is becoming less competitive as it consolidates more, can get away with driving up the costs of every other industry in the country and yet employers refuse to join the movement for national health care.
Even the Pacific Maritime Association, the employer group the ILWU Longshore Division negotiates with, won’t move. In our 2002 contract the employers signed a letter of understanding saying they would work with us towards national health care to deal with their skyrocketing costs. But three years later they still haven’t done one thing towards that goal.
Against all odds the ILWU has always fought not just to protect our retirees pensions and health care, but to improve them--and we will never give up on that tradition.
