Health insurance and Detroit's Big 3
From the New York Times:
The reason comes down to simple self-interest. The United Auto Workers is one of the few private-sector unions that doesn't run its own health plan. Rather, most have created huge companies to administer their workers' plans, giving them a large and often corrupt stake in the current system...Now you see why American cars cost so much.
Despite shrinking membership, organized labor still has enough money and muscle to get behind a campaign for national health insurance. Last month, public-sector unions in California came up with tens of millions of dollars in a successful campaign to defeat a ballot measure that challenged their right to use union dues for political purposes.
The problem is getting American unions to fight for common concerns as opposed to narrow institutional interests. It may just be that a broad-scale union overhaul will have to precede one in American health care.
posted by Xavier and Pedro at 2:40 PM
2 Comments:
IT may be that unions should be more interested in healthcare, but I still don't see why cars cost so much. Manufacturers brag about how few man/hours per "unit" are used, so where does most of that $30,000 to $60,000 go? I don't particularly care how much new cars cost--I don't buy them--but why point fingers at the poor sap who is actually doing the work to make them and earning just a fraction of the money they bring in? Someone else is making a lot more money from this. -Roy
It's not the poor sap doing the work, it's the union he/she works for. I'm not anti-union, but there has to be some cost accountability here. - P
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