3. Everybody In Nobody Out: Taking Healthcare Off the Bargaining Table

no other industrialized country in the world treats healthcare as a benefit that's linked to our employment this was really kind of a second best solution the unions in America came up with after World War Two and FDR's promise to the American people to create health care as a right for everybody went unfulfilled so we began to negotiate health care benefits for ourselves and our members studies have shown that the average working class family with healthcare benefits that the total cost of those

benefits are exceeding $28,000 per year employers are contributing somewhere in the range of $15,000 per year which means those families are paying between twelve and thirteen thousand dollars out-of-pocket plus what they have to sacrifice in bargaining health care costs have gone up two times faster than our wages for the last two decades and every one trades wages and other benefits for how to preserve their health care every contract negotiations

we trade off on wages and benefits I'm told that brothers and sisters in the maintenance of wait are putting about $1200 excess into their health care costs as a result of this crazy system of employment based benefits imagine what we could do with that kind of money at the bargaining table this problem is a major driver of wage stagnation our wages have been flat for 40 years in this country and this is one of the things that has drive that stagnation there is a poll that just came out that showed that 61 percent of

all Americans would trade 10% of their income for a promise that their health care costs would not go up for the next five years so imagine what that does when you go to the bargaining table and the employer knows that your members have as their number one issue the press of their healthcare benefits when we bargain for healthcare we bargain against ourselves because our employer uses our need for health care as a way to should chisel us down on every other issue that's important to us we have got

to take health care off the bargaining table by making it a right for everyone in America