Does GOP hate Obamacare or Unions more?

The post title here is rhetorical. Conservative Republicans hate both with equal fervor. But it is interesting to watch them twist themselves into knots with the Obama administration's move last week to deny a waiver sought by labor unions to cover multi-employer health plans common in some industries.

First, Republicans praised unions for criticizing the Affordable Care Act:

“It’s encouraging to see those who strongly endorsed the health care law finally recognize its fundamental problems,” the GOP-led House Education and Workforce Committee said in a statement Thursday.

Then they immediately made hay bashing unions again:

And even if the administration isn’t signaling that it’s going to respond to union demands — Republicans are moving to preempt any such accommodation.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has introduced the Union Bailout Prevention Act and filed it as an amendment to the energy bill the Senate is debating. By Thursday, he had 10 co-sponsors.

“The Republicans are perfectly happy to crow about how the unions hate the law too, but hell will freeze over before they agree to do” anything legislatively to address their concerns, [Washington & Lee University Professor Tim] Jost said.

Sigh.

My personal favorite commentary was this rather unhinged reaction by Aik Roy, allegedly one of the smarter conservative commentators on health care. He's does an about face from (incorrectly) hyperventilating that ACA exchanges will lead to rate shocks people paying much more for insurance to crowing about how workers will get better insurance and lead to the end of unions in the United States.

Why?

Well, because government-sponsored health insurance remove union's role in managing health care and show workers that unions are unnecessary:

The great irony—one that union leaders are only now starting to recognize—is that by [backing universal health insurance], they’ve accelerated their own demise, at least in the private sector. Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers are unionized. That number will continue to decline as workers realize they don’t need unions for their health benefits. The labor movement will increasingly become comprised of public-sector unions, giving it a far different character than it has today.

Most importantly, workers will benefit from this change. Instead of paying a big chunk of their wages to labor unions and insurance companies, they’ll be able to keep those wages for themselves.

But we can test this hypothesis. According to Roy's logic, countries with universal government-sponsored health insurance -- especially single-payer systems -- should cut unions out of the system. Without health insurance to dangle in front of their members, unions should then whither away and these countries should have low union densities.

Do Roy's contentions hold up?  Not so much.  According to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 23.5 percent of the U.S. work force was unionized in 1970. In 2003, that had dropped to 12.4 percent, a decline of 47 percent. In contrast, Canada with its universal health insurance went from a union density of  31.8 percent to 28.4 percent, a decline of 10.7 percent. The average European Union country dropped from 37.8 percent to 26 percent - a decline of 32 percent. (See page 8 of the study)

Not only are the absolute levels of union membership higher in countries with universal healthcare, but their decline have been slower than in the United States. Sorry Aivk, thanks for playing.

Roy is likely to get his wish of weaker unions. But it has nothing to do with universal health insurance. The long shadow of the Taft-Hartley law, the destruction of traditionally unionized manufacturing industries, and state governments run by vandals have done a quite effective job of destroying organized labor and eroding workers living standards over the last four decades.

Thoughts on Obama administration denying union attempts for an ACA waiver

UPDATE: There's a political dimension to this, which I'll deal with in another post.

Ezra Klein, Politico and Avik Roy  reported that the Obama administration denied a key waiver sought by labor leaders for a type of multiple-insurer insurance plan that covers more than 20 million American workers.

Unions,  particularly the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers and the garment workers union (UNITE HERE) wanted the Obama administration to make these plans (called "Taft-Hartley" plans after the legislation that created them) eligible for subsidies offered under the new state health exchanges. As Klein notes, however, they don't comply with some of the requirements of the exchange plans (general issue for example) Also, the plans are already tax-exempt -- and will be until 2018 when taxes will be levied on the company-paid plan premiums in excess of $10,000 for an individual and $27,000 for a family.

Labor is a bit miffed because they believe that the administration is delaying regulations for businesses while leaving labor out. I'm sympathetic to this, but I'm not really sure how how the administration could have ruled otherwise. If they make this exemption for the labor plans, it might open up Pandora's box. How will they stop businesses from claiming both subsidies and tax-exemptions for offering insurance?  How will they deny insurers who want to open plans on the exchanges that don't have guaranteed issue (i.e. exclude sick people)? It has the potential to undermine some pretty big parts of the Affordable Care Act in the way the delaying other regulations for 12-24 months won't.

What are the ramifications of the Obama administration's refusal to grant a waiver for these plans? The short answer is that we don't know. There are several shifting incentives here that may shift the state of the Taft-Hartley plans in a variety of directions.

Trader Joe's decision good sign for Obamacare

Recently, Trader Joe's  made waves when it announced that it would stop offering health insurance to currently eligible part-time employees (about 17,000 employees) and give them an extra $500 in pay to let them shop for coverage on the new health care exchanges that will open on Oct. 1.

At first glance, this looks terrible: a private company is taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act and dumping workers' benefits to save money -- others surely will soon.

On reflection though, this is probably a good thing. After all, the private insurance market has been unraveling for over a decade anyway. Trader Joe's is still offering benefits to its full-time employees. Health reform hasn't caused the collapse of employer insurance in Massachusetts. Finally, Trader Joe's part-timers will on the balance have access to health insurance for a fair price -- regardless of their future employment.

Like many economic developments, this move creates winners and losers. But we can't stop there: we need to ask two questions: First, who wins and who loses? Second, how much do they win or lose?

Generation Y and "Entitlement"

Amen Mr. Weinstein.

I have a PhD from one of the finest universities in the country and I've taught more classes than many tenure-track professors have, but after applying for 85 academic jobs in two years, I've come up empty. It's a simply terrifying experience for most of us on the market --we're generally far better qualified than our peers who graduated in the 1960s and 1970s were, but we're being shut out. I'll be writing more on the problems of contingent short-term labor in academia over the coming months, but they're pretty similar to the ones journalists and others of our generation face.

And Weinstein nails my attitude toward people who look at us in the 22-35 crowd with contempt:

This state of affairs does not exist because we're entitled and have simply declined to work as hard as the people that birthed us. American workers have changed from generation to generation: Since 1979, the alleged Dawn of the Millennial, the average U.S. worker has endured a 75 percent increase in productivity...while real wages stayed flat.

Any lecturer with a PhD. patching together a 4-4 course load across three different universities for $19,000 a year gets it.

As I've written, I'm one of the lucky ones -- no student debt, decent health, a soon-to-be spouse with a decent job.  I always wonder if I have the right to complain -- well, here's Weinstein's answer to that question:

So no, we shan't be doing as well as our parents, and no, we shan't be shutting up about it. If anything, those of us who have been cowed into silence because college-educated poor problems aren't real poor problems should shed our fears and start talking about just how hard it really is out there, man.

 So, complain it shall be, though with the awareness that some one is always worse off -- and an emphasis on effective action as well.

As usual, invoking Atrios' sentiment in the titles of his posts sums up the point pithily.

Home-care workers get federal wage protections

The Obama administration just announced that home-care workers qualify for federal  wage protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is a big deal. Most of these workers already make at least the minimum wage, but they don't qualify for overtime salaries because they were literally classified as babysitters.

According to the Department of Labor, there are about 2 million workers that qualify for the new protections --nearly 50 percent of whom are minorities.

It's not surprising that a job classification dominated by minorities (and women, but that's another story) was exempt from the FLSA. The exemptions were part of the price that Jim-Crow-era Southern politicians extracted as their price for the passage of much of the New Deal. They wanted relief from the Great Depression, but only would agree to social programs that did not interfere with the peculiar institutions of the south that kept African Americans on the bottom of the labor and social structure. (It's also why every Southern Democrat joined pro-business owner Republicans in backing the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act) For those looking for a good history on the subject, Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White details the whole depressing process.

Today's long-overdue step eradicates a small part of the poisonous legacy over despite the opposition of for-profit nursing homes.

Finally: Elections have consequences. This wouldn't have happened in a Mitt Romney administration.