By Mark Gruenberg

PAI Staff Writer

            WASHINGTON (PAI)--Leaders of the Service Employees are again urging approval of the Senate’s version of comprehensive health care revision legislation, calling it “a jobs bill” that could help lower the federal deficit -- and, says one, prevent political disaster for Democrats at the polls this fall.

            “Take the Senate bill as it is, pass it and then fix the things that need to be fixed,” declared Service Employees President Andrew Stern on Jan. 26.

            But the stand by Stern and SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, who also chairs Change To Win, may fall on deaf congressional ears.  That’s because lawmakers not only are struggling with how to get health care past the Republican filibuster blockade in the Senate -- now that the GOP has the 41 votes it needs -- but are increasingly demanding a focus on more-traditional job-creation legislation.

            And even Stern recognized that struggle, calling Washington’s political process “a completely toxic culture,” adding “there are a lot of terrorists in the Senate” who hold health care and other legislation hostage.

            Stern and Burger argued for the Senate health care plan at a forum about “The State of the American Worker,” hosted by the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank.  Stern said the bill could create a million health care jobs -- jobs that would not be off-shored or outsourced.

            Their remarks occurred the day SEIU was rebuked by thousands of its health care members in recognition elections in California, as three sets of Kaiser Permanente health care workers in Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly to leave SEIU after 30 years for the independent National Union of Healthcare Workers (see separate story).  SEIU, which claims 2 million members, is one of the nation’s largest health care unions.

            Stern laid out the laundry list of problems facing U.S. workers, from complete lack of new job creation in the last decade to concentration of wealth to long-term unemployment.  But he warned the problems workers face are structural, not cyclical.

“We’re living through the most profound, most transformative economic revolution in the history of the world,” Stern said, repeating a line he has often used.

            “This is not my grandfather’s or my uncle’s economy.  We have our first competitor” in years as the dominant economy, China.  And workers do not “have one

job in their lifetime...Employees and employers are getting a divorce, and even if workers want to stay with a company, two out of three employers won’t be there in 25 years,” Stern added, before leaving the solutions to Burger.

            “We need to earn our way out of the crisis,” Burger said of the current Great Recession, “by creating jobs.”  

            “Conversations have to start with how to put people to work today, not two years from now,” she said, citing the immediate job-creation programs of past years, including FDR’s New Deal and Richard Nixon’s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act.

            The health care revision is one way to do that, Burger contended.  Another is to keep money flowing for vital state and local services, before states have to cut a combined 900,000 jobs this year to close budget gaps.  There should also be a supplemental “public service jobs” program “of painting schools, and providing child care and elder care, things like that,” Burger added.

            And a third way to put money in people’s pockets, Burger declared, is to “make sure the jobs we provide are good jobs” by passing the Employee Free Choice Act to give workers a level playing field with bosses.  The act, labor’s other top legislative priority, also faces a planned GOP filibuster.

            Stern openly endorsed the Senate-passed health care revision bill, including its 40% tax on the value of health plans above $8,500 for an individual and $23,000 for a family.  Including Stern, some top union leaders later reached a compromise with the Democratic Obama administration, raising the floors and postponing the tax until 2018 for health plans in union contracts, in return for reversal of the unionists’ anti-tax stand.

            “Take the Senate bill as it is, then fix the things that need to be fixed by using reconciliation,” Stern said.  Reconciliation is a special congressional procedure for budget fixes only that avoids filibusters and needs just 51 senators to pass.

            When the health care revision bill passes, Burger predicted to Press Associates Union News Service afterwards, people will look beyond “the lies” told about it, see it creates jobs and improves their health care and come out and work for and vote for pro-worker Democratic congressional candidates who back it.

            “We pass it in reconciliation and the tax won’t be there,” Burger explained about the scenario of the fixes.  “Then more people will be covered and they’ll vote on what it (health care) has, as opposed to what they’ve been told it’ll do.  And it’ll be a jobs bill.”

            Health care’s passage will also bring back independent voters, Burger said:  “It really resonates with them.  If we can show we’ve done something, we’ll be fine.” 

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