Where energy, grit, creativity, resiliency, and solidarity came together for three (3) solid, pulsating days…
Labor Notes is the forty-five (45) year-young, dynamic media and organizing project serving frontline union activists and agitators – self-described troublemakers committed to infusing the movement back into the labor movement. Through the deployment of a news magazine, website, books, pamphlets, conferences, and workshops, Labor Notes promotes and supports aggressive strategies to confront employers, build labor-community solidarity, and cultivate bottom-up, member-driven unions.
Within the context of a labor movement more popular today than at any time since 1965 (68% approval in 2025, see: https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx), but also a worker organizing crusade more besieged than at any time since the Reagan years, with lower wages, declining job security, and weak or non-existent benefits packages.
So, following an evening of late-night carousing, what would be the turnout at our Sunday 9am workshop: “Fighting for Good Healthcare for Working People”? Fifty-three (53) worker-organizers packed our 50-seat room, ready to engage, share, and prepare for battle. Blew. Us. Away.
My presentation partner, former United Electrical Worker president Carl Rosen, did an incredible job leading off with reality-check facts about rising healthcare premiums being passed on to workers in contract bargaining, in addition to increased out-of-pocket payments for deductibles, co-payments, surprise bills, and hidden “taxes” (auto insurance premiums, workman’s comp, property taxes, emergency transport, etc.), plus skyrocketing pharmaceutical prices, out-of-network restrictions, medical care denials, employment-based insurance “job lock,” shifting provider networks, and the boss’s go-to threat to cut off, or actual cessation of, health insurance coverage as punishment for worker strikes.
Bottom line: employment-based health insurance is a drag on workers’ pockets (whether union or non-union), workplace power, work and social mobility, community cohesion, state and national economies, and the labor movement itself.
My part-2 job, as an AFT Local 9608 member and president of One Payer States (OPS), was to define the healthcare solution for all but the Medical Industrial Complex’s (MIC) “Four Horsemen from Hell” (Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Hospitals, Big Medical Device and Supply Manufacturers) and their anti-worker owner-management class allies, especially in non-MIC big industries: national expanded-and-improved Medicare for All (MFA+).
I then updated folks on the tremendous progress being on MFA+ at the state and regional levels, where several states (CA, CO, ME, NY, OR, WA, to name a few) are poised to legislate and implement universal healthcare systems in the next few years – state-based demonstration programs to prove the lower cost, administratively efficient, patient-centered, life enhancing, and job-generating outcomes on the way to national expanded-and-improved Medicare for All. Put another way, think of OPS’ 50-state campaign goal as achieving national MFA+ through the states.
For part-3, Carl then pivoted and talked about workers and unions using the leverage of contract negotiations to improve healthcare benefits and as an instrument to test the boss’s stated concern about worker health – which it rarely is! – with a firm and specific request that they publicly endorse state and national universal healthcare bill. This two-prong strategy, in addition to the continued job of educating co-workers and neighbors to increase advocacy pressure on state and national legislators to pass one-payer/single-payer/MFA+ legislation, more effectively uses the most potent tool workers possess: workplace power.
Finally, my part-4 portion of our presentation leaned into the discussion of a comprehensive economic strategy to win healthcare and health justice for all. Transformative Justice for All. As with several previous articles here on OpEd News, I referred to the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA) project to build a secure, web-based infrastructure to connect and coordinate the collective power of all justice organizations and individuals in pursuit of universal justice, across-the-board. I laid out the argument that our shared vision and values, tools and skills training, bolstered by a unified strategic vision and workable plan, executed with discipline and purpose, offers all of us the best chance of lifting the labor movement and all economic and social justice campaigns to victory after victory after victory.
More than half of the worker-organizers in the room signed up to engage with the AJA infrastructure and strategy project. With off-the-charts Labor Notes recruitment coming on the heels of the powerful Netroots Nation connecting the previous week and now, the international, anti-fascist Global Resistance (which I’ll report on next week) networking going extremely well this weekend (18-21 June), the AJA and OPS campaigns are hitting full stride.
As always, radical hope, eyes wide open, strategy forward,
Chuck
P.S. Special thanks to labor organizing comrades Peter Olney (ILWU), Peter Knowlton (UE), Dan DiMaggio (Labor Notes), Mark Dudzik (LC4SP), Rose Roach (LC4SP) and, of course, Carl Rosen (UE), for their extraordinary help in supporting the creation and launch of this incredible panel.