The Two Barbaras
What kind of readers find Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent books remotely edifying? How far up their own asses are these people? I have to admit that I’ve yet to read the book in which she passes for working poor, although I did read her earlier piece in Harper’s magazine that served as a teaser. The fact that some of the lowest-paid service workers have to live in motels because they can’t afford a full month’s rent on an apartment was the only revelation for me (in New York, even our motels are too expensive, so people cram dozens of bodies in small apartments). Do you want to know how the poor live? Talk to your janitor, waitress or telemarketer. The paucity of actual interviews in Ehrenreich’s books saps the story of emotional resonance and dulls her political points. This tendency is exacerbated in “Bait and Switch,” in which our supposed heroine […]
More On Inequality Sickness
Following up on my previous post, in case I wasn’t clear (“Are you following me?”), here is a simple graph that argues much more clearly that inequality is making us sicker: This chart represents diabetes rates by income group (divided simply into thirds; the richest third of the population, the middle third and the poorest third) in the UK and the US. First, note that the poorer you are, the likelier you are to have diabetes. In America, this is not surprising, because our poor lack health care. In the UK, however, the poor has the same health care as the rich (or at least the middle class), and yet they are still more likely to have diabetes, although not nearly as likely as their American counterparts. But now, compare the poorest Brits to the richest Americans. Lower rates of diabetes! Both groups receive similar quality of health care, so […]
Dr. Robin Hood
Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with. Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by […]
Hershey’s Corporate Kiss-Off
This article was originally published in the January-February 2003 issue of “The Socialist.” The recent announcement by the trust that operates the Hershey Industrial School that it was considering selling a large stake in the Hershey Foods Corporation set off waves of protest in the town of Hershey, PA, that eventually sunk the proposal. What kind of company town has effective veto power over its corporate benefactor’s business plans? Clearly, Hershey is a company town like know other. To understand it better, one should place the town’s history in the context of the social reform movement of the turn of the century that formed alternative model communities founded with the aims of conquering the abject poverty and gross inequalities of the era’s great cities. The most identifiable are the socialist cooperatives like Robert Owen’s New Harmony, IN and Job Harriman’s New Llanos, CA, but socialists did not have a monopoly […]
Rise of the Loompa Proletariat
In the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Willy Wonka employs in his factory Oompa Loompas, strange little orange men who seemingly work for free. The Oompa Loompas, who sing while they work, seem to be charged with much manual labor. They mix the chocolate and other confections, carry out Wonka’s orders, manually power his personal yacht and otherwise do his bidding-all at the beck and call of his whistle. After seeing just one minute of the movie with the Oompa Loompas on the screen, one obsesses about this work arangement. Are these Oompa Loompas slaves, or indentured servants? Are they salaried employees? Is this some Stalinist work camp? Wonka answers this question himself early on when several visitors on a tour of his factory raise these troubling issues. The Oompa Loompas, he explains, come from a far off place called “Lumpaland,” where, because of their diminutive size, they […]
Health Care’s “Death Spiral”
In “Uninsured in America,” Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle attempt to find out “where the bodies are buried” in our health care system where over 45 million people have no insurance. The book is a patchwork of profiles of people who got sick at times when they lacked insurance and the often devastating effects this had on their lives. The authors, who describe this phenomenon as the “death spiral,” don’t find so many bodies buried (although they do find many in jails or on the street) but they do find health problems that are allowed to become critical before state assistance will kick in and doctors actually pay attention, and emergency rooms used as primary care resulting in crippling debts. Without getting bogged down in dry facts and figures, the authors provide a pretty good understanding of how the number of uninsured Americans hides how many Americans are functionally […]
Why No National Health Care?
The United States has the best health care that money can buy, provided one has the money to buy it. Jill Quadagno’s “One Nation Uninsured” answers the question “Why the U.S. has no national health insurance.” It’s a brisk, engaging read that neatly summarizes how 90 years of failed reform efforts have entrenched the powerful interests that profit from the system. The most prominent early opponents of a national health service were the doctors themselves. Their lobby, the American Medical Association, fought against “socialized medicine” out of fear that it would lead doctors to lose their sovereignty to bureaucrats basing decisions on budgetary needs rather than medical needs. Allied with southern politicians who feared that a federal health system would force racial integration of hospitals, these forces successfully kept national health care out of Roosevelt’s original Social Security legislation. They favored market solutions like Blue Cross and commercial insurance. A […]
Union Busting 102 at Pace University: Professors as Temps
I am continuing to guest blog at DMIblog, writing about unionization, academia and Kentucky River, and giving Pace University a black eye. This is my second post, which appears there. Please direct comments to that site. The National Labor Relations Board’s terrible Kentucky River decisions, which this week greatly expanded the definition of “supervisors,” has handed the bosses a powerful new union busting tool. The implications for these decisions go far beyond hospitals and nurses and may eventually deny the right to form a union to all professional employees (perhaps a quarter of the entire workforce in a few short years, according to the NLRB). The union rights of employees in higher education have been under assault for much longer. Back in 1980, the Supreme Court denied the right to organize to most college professors, ruling that if they sat on advisory and recommendatory committees, and had a say in […]
Union Busting 101 at Pace University: Delay, Appeal and Refuse to Bargain
I am currently guest blogging at DMIblog, highlighting the difficulties of union organizing through the NLRB (pre-Kentucky River, even!), specifically at Pace University. This is my first post, which appears there. Please direct comments to that site. The business of union busting is booming, guided by law firms and consultants that are adept at manipulating the legal process to delay union recognition and stretch out their campaigns of harassment and intimidation to defeat workers’ attempts to gain a voice at work. The hallowed halls of academia are not immune to the ugliness of union busting, not with CEO-style presidents like Pace University’s David Caputo, who recently gave himself a $100,000 raise while doling out meager “merit” increases of less than 2.5% to his staff. It’s no wonder that the employees of Pace have begun to organize. What is a wonder is that Pace will be celebrating an “employee recognition day” […]
Rally at Pace University for Union Rights
Two years ago, the bus drivers and mechanics at Pace University, – an institution that just gave its President David Caputo a $100,000 raise while doling out stingy “merit” increases of less than 3% to the staff – organized a union to win better pay and benefits. The University has refused to recognize and bargain with the union ever since. On Friday, October 6th, 2006, Pace University will host an “employee recognition day” and a self-congratulatory “birthday celebration” for its 100th anniversary. Join New York State United Teachers, the NYC Central Labor Council and AFL-CIO on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 2:00 for a solidarity rally in support of the bus drivers and mechanics at Pace University. Hold Pace accountable. Demand that they recognize the rights of their workers on this “employee recognition day.” Let them know that a legacy of union-busting is nothing worth celebrating. Join us at 1 […]