A complete new union with none of the old leaders, and stop collecting all the large sums of money they suck from you. They do get nasty in a mobster way, if you don’t agree with the majority of union workers. Actually the bad taste I have from unions in the 70’s would require benefits that they could never get me.
As Lemur pointed out, you are now paying the full premiums by yourself, and you are unemployed, which means you don’t know when you’ll have money again. You still need food, a place to live, transportation and clothing. But … maybe you won’t get sick. COBRA is not a solution, as it imposes much higher costs on an individual at a time when he or she is least able to afford them.
It imposes the actual costs. It was a bit more expensive for me, but I had savings for it and with my unemployment insurance it wasn’t a difficult cost to bear. However, I’m single and in good health, I could easily see this as a major problem for someone with a family and less savings.
Is this something that a union would be better at taking care of? Or would this be better handled by a fundamental change in our health care system? Of could both approaches be part of the solution? In order to fund this, I would thing union dues would need to be fairly steep. How is this operated now in unions? Is this something that union members can opt out of?
Something like this. I’m not a member, but I work with them almost every day.
One other thing, which I sort ofmentioned but probably didn’t make clear: it CANNOT be an actual union.
That is, it cannot have a monopoly on MY labor. I must be able to sell my labor when, how, and where I see fit, as I choose. This distinguishes guilds and profesionals from unions. The union is nothing more than a separate corporation with an unusual method fo paying dividends; its product is other peope’s labor. And because of that, it will eventuall no longer protect but rather exploits its employees.
And I will not let ANYONE control my labor. Period. I sell it to the company on certain conditions: but if I choose I can quit and take my labor to another company. The unions try to shut this down, by trying to control the entire labor of industries or whoel facilities.
I would happily join a union on the following conditions:
a) It seeks to be non-adversarial with the organization by which we are employed. If possible, the union acquires a vested interest in the organization and/or union membership includes individual ownership of stock in that organization. Furthermore, as part of the very bylaws, it is established as principle that collective bargaining is to be towards the establishment, then tweaking, of a formula for determining wages, calculating wage increases (or if necessary cuts) from a combination of corporate profits, inflation index, corporate net worth, value of the stock, typical wages for comparable positions elsewhere, etc., rather than towards a hard-wired wage or raise figure.
b) No permanent officers, and no full-time union officers; all union management tasks will be shared by the membership with a required participation and a rotating schedule, and policy will be determined in the most democratic fashion possible
c) It seeks to promote and maintain high standards within the white-collar skill set(s) to which it pertains, hosting scholarships, establishing advanced qualification criteria, and providing additional educational and training opportunities for those employed. It does not seek simply to act as a “gatekeeper”, keeping people out of the profession in order to keep the pool of such people rarefied so as to keep the salaries high.
Yeah, but insurance through the union has the same problem. Or do you imagine that if you’re unemployed the union will happily pay your insurance premiums for you?
“Health insurance through your union” doesn’t mean that the union pays for your health insurance, each individual member would still have to pay their own insurance premiums. Otherwise “union dues” would be sky-high…hundreds of dollars every month. And if you’re unemployed how can you keep up with your “union dues”? How long will the union keep you as a member when they are paying hundreds of dollars per month for your health insurance and you aren’t contributing anything?
Here’s the problem. An individual human can’t just walk into an insurance office and purchase reasonably priced health insurance. Why is that? Because healthy people don’t do that, only people who imagine they’re going to have large medical bills are going to do that. Since people looking to purchase private health insurance are likely to need much more medical care than an average person, insurance companies will charge and arm and a leg for it, otherwise they can’t make a profit. The purchaser is betting that they’ll get more medical care than they pay for, the insurer is betting that they’ll get less medical care than they pay for. And with private insurance companies, even not for profit insurance companies, they have to provide less medical care than people pay for, otherwise the insurer goes broke.
The only advantage union-based medical insurance has over individual medical insurance is that the union provides a large statistical universe of people, many of them aren’t going to get sick…they only get insurance because they MIGHT get sick. And most people are going to recieve less medical care than they pay for, and these people subsidize the people who get more medical care than they pay for. But you still have to pay!
Companies pay for their employee’s medical insurance because that’s another form of compensation, along with salary, stock options, bonuses, free sodas, corner offices, and so on, and it costs a company several hundred dollars a month to insure an employee. Unions are funded by contributions from the members. So if the model is “everyone in the union gets fully funded health insurance that doesn’t cost anything” that means that every union member is going to have to fork over hundred of dollars every month in union dues, and if you’re unemployed those union dues won’t appear by magic any more than COBRA payments do.
Riiiight…
As a former Teamster Shop Steward, Unions cause generally more harm than good in more organizations than not. They’re busily and currently ruining a perfectly good group of hard-working people near me.
The answer is no, I wouldn’t join a white collar union if my hair were on fire and they held the only pail of water left on earth.
The existance of COBRA should be a wake-up call to unions exactly how much it costs to employ someone. If you go from paying $100 a month while working to $900 a month on COBRA, in retrospect, who do you think paid that other $800 while you were working? The insurance fairy?
Calling someone a troll is forbidden outside the Pit. You know that. This is an official warning.
Damn, I was gonna post a response, but Lemur somehow read my mind and posted it before I read this and responded!
How the hell did he do that? 
Medical costs are the most common reason for bankruptcy in the US. So, yeah, it’s a problem.
My idea of union health insurance is that it would be offered when union members were between jobs, like COBRA, but at more like the usual rates paid by members, or for free. Now, I’m all for a single payer plan, but the freakin’ conservatives and libertarians hate anything that smacks of fiscal responsbility so if it takes unions to make health insurance portable, so be it. It seems like an opportunity they could exploit, since the present system is so broken.
Duly noted.
Nobody thinks the insurance fairy is paying for it. The real issue is, why are costs so high? I thought those wonderful HMOs, businesses’ favored solution IIRC, were going to solve all that. In any event, point is, when you’re unemployed, it doesn’t matter that you were getting a really great deal while employed. You still can’t afford that $900. To suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
Read my previous post. I was suggesting that the union only cover health insurance while members are between gigs. Or at least, cover what the employer formerly covered. If the company is already paying for insurance while employed, let them.
Unions could use covering members while unemployed as a way of attracting members, eh?
Yes, there’s a thread for that, why dojn’t you respond in that one? And why didnt’ you read the OP, or some of the responses to similar posts where I asked people to read the OP?
What part of my post are you so eloquently questioning? I’m not a Teamster, btw.
It does sound like a white-collar union-ish kinda dealie. Seems like something that could be a start. Add in some professional help in keeping salaries and benefits high, you got yourself something there. But I was thinking more of a union for file clerks, office administrator, accountants, data entry personnel, you know, the many, many people who work in offices who are low on the totem pole. They could use some collective bargaining power.
Gee, Sam, imagine that, you DON’T want to join a union. Mmm, mm. Color me totally unsurprised.
There really isn’t a lot of guild activity in America. Too proto-union-ish, I imagine.