Remember the phrase "good union job"? Living wages, basic safety protections, and guaranteed quality healthcare for life. Today Peabody Coal is taking away retiree health care and pensions, yet they have record profits. Why the fight for retiree pensions at Peabody Coal is in everyone's interest.
The UC health-care system boasts nearly $7 billion in operating revenue, but management wants to create a two-tier pension system for workers, while executives get yearly pension payouts of as much as $300,000.
The union is demanding stronger protection against subcontracting. Workers also want more of a voice in staffing and patient care matters.
Researchers are cautiously optimistic that the slowdown in health care spending is here to stay. Two factors potentially contributing to the record slowdown in growth to 3.1 percent during 2007-11: job loss and benefit changes shifting costs to the insured. Other fundamental changes, including less-rapid development of imaging technology and new pharmaceuticals may have led to the majority of the slowdown: 10 year savings may equal $770 billion.
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A high-stakes fight between one of the nation's largest unions and an upstart, homegrown rival over which one should get to represent thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers in California entered Round 2 this month. NUHW-CNA face off against SEIU. Mail-in voting concludes Monday, and a final tally is expected by Friday.
The Chained CPI, deceptively portrayed as a reasonable cost of living adjustment, is a cut to Social Security that would hurt seniors. Watch Robert Reich explain why Chained CPI is so stingy in this video, and then sign his SignOn.org petition to President Obama here.
This video is a MoveOn original.
“If the cost of compliance to our rules outweighs the penalties for breaking them, companies just take a ‘catch me if you can’ approach to worker safety and health,” he said. And serious violations of the rules should not be misdemeanors, he said, but felonies, much like insider trading, tax crimes and antitrust violations. -- David Michaels, OSHA director
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The cascade of trauma center closures around the country epitomizes the challenges to combating healthcare inequities in a for-profit system. In the absence of federal or state regulations mandating the availability of trauma care, hospitals in high poverty areas have found that simply closing their trauma units improves their bottom line.
What should have been a model for health care reform faces an uncertain future. Because the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tilts the playing field to disadvantage multiemployer plans, this decades-old gain of the labor movement may be irreparably damaged.
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