Health Care
Health care is a basic human right. America’s labor movement has worked for more than a century for guaranteed high-quality health care for everyone. The Affordable Care Act is a historic milestone on this journey, but we still have a long way to go.
America must continue moving forward toward a more equitable and cost-effective health care system. Moving forward means working with employers to demand health care payment and delivery reforms to control costs, allowing people of all ages to buy into the equivalent of Medicare through a public plan option and allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. Of course, the most cost-effective and equitable way to provide quality health care is through the social insurance model (“Medicare for All”), as other industrialized countries have shown.
The worst thing we could do is move backward by repealing the Affordable Care Act or its key provisions; privatizing Medicare or turning it into a voucher program; raising the Medicare eligibility age; increasing Medicare co-pays and deductibles or otherwise cutting Medicare benefits; or taxing employment-based health care benefits.
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The city’s Housing Authority and Teamsters Local 237 have struck a deal on a new contract that will for the first time allow employees to do weekend maintenance work at NYCHA housing.
Nearly 20 union leaders were arrested and hundreds of faculty, staff and students demonstrated in the wintry cold Dec. 10 to demand full funding for the City University of New York.
Staffers at New York Magazine on Wednesday morning asked management to voluntarily recognize an editorial union, joining a host of other news and magazine organizations that have similarly unionized in recent years.
Writers and editors at Slate have voted nearly unanimously to green-light a strike if management refuses to agree to a fair contract. Slate’s editorial employees, represented by the Writers Guild of America–East, authorized the potential strike by a vote of 52 to 1.
After an almost two-year fight for a fair contract, employees at Law360, a LexisNexis-owned legal news site, successfully secured a first-ever tentative agreement covering 170 workers.
More than a dozen members of the Legal Services Staff Association, UAW Local 2320, headed to Texas this week to volunteer their legal knowledge and expertise for some of the most urgent legal cases today.
The International Labor Communications Association, founded in 1955, is the professional organization of labor communicators in North America.
The NYC Central Labor Council hosts Political Directors meetings every month.
After three contract extensions, months of bargaining and over two years of uncertainty and fight-back, 1199SEIU workers employed by NYU Langone have reached a new contract with their employer.
The Writers Guild of America, East announced this week that the video, editorial, social and content acquisition staffs at The Dodo—the digital news site focused on animals and animal rights—voted unanimously in favor of ratifying their first union contract.