Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Twenty-seven U.S. labor unions defied White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and announced their opposition to the $829 billion health-care measure passed yesterday by the Senate Finance Committee.
The unions say in a full-page newspaper advertisement today that lawmakers need to make “substantial” changes to the bill or they will urge their members to seek its defeat on the Senate floor. Emanuel asked organized labor not to go public in opposition, said Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
“He told us that we really don’t want to be looked upon as the group that stopped meaningful health-care reform,” McEntee said in an interview yesterday. “We would love to be on the exact same page as the White House, but we see ourselves as fighting for our members.”
Sarah Feinberg, senior adviser to Emanuel, declined to comment.
Unions helped elect President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress, and have made overhauling the health-care system a top priority. They oppose elements of the bill approved by the Senate committee, including a tax on the most-expensive insurance plans. Some union contracts provide health benefits costly enough to be affected.
The provision will become “a tax on the middle class,” who “through negotiations or otherwise, have employer-provided coverage,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in an e-mailed statement.
The measure would impose a 40 percent excise tax on insurers of employer-sponsored health plans with benefits exceeding $8,000 for individual coverage and $21,000 for families.
AFL-CIO, Auto Workers
Among groups signing the ad, which appeared today in Washington newspapers, were the United Auto Workers, the Air Line Pilots Association, the United Steel Workers and the AFL- CIO, the world’s biggest labor federation with about 11 million members.
The ad’s headline is: “Our Bottom Line for Health Care Reform.” Calling for “good, affordable health care,” it says, “We aren’t there yet. The Senate Finance Committee bill is deeply flawed.”
The unions want Congress to create a so-called public option, a government health plan that would compete with private insurers, and to require that almost all employers provide health care or contribute to a fund subsidizing coverage. Neither provision is in the measure that the Finance Committee approved, 14-9.
The bill, passed with the vote of one Republican, Olympia Snow of Maine, clears the way for a full Senate debate over the broadest expansion of the government’s role in the medical system since the creation of Medicare in 1965.
Snow’s Vote
The vote by Snow marks the first time a Republican in the Democratic-controlled Senate or House of Representatives has supported the health legislation, Obama’s top domestic priority.
Senate and House Democratic leaders must now merge competing versions of the bills in each chamber and schedule floor debates. If the resulting measures pass the House and Senate, the two bills would have to be reconciled.
Unions hope their public opposition will pressure Democrats to adhere to labor’s goals, McEntee said. Labor will also press its views in private meetings with lawmakers, he said. “If it reaches the floor in this manner, we will ask them to vote against it,” he said.
‘Not the Commitment’
McEntee said Emanuel called him and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on a Sunday last month and asked them not to oppose the legislation while the Finance Committee was considering it. “We didn’t talk to any senators about our opposition,” he said.
Emanuel pressed labor again last week not to oppose the bill once it was approved by the committee, according to McEntee. “That was not the commitment we made,” he said.
Labor leaders have made clear their distaste toward the committee bill since it was proposed last month by Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and the panel’s chairman. Trumka urged labor activists at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh to make the case against it. McEntee led the convention delegates in a chant denouncing the proposal as “bullshit.”
Some labor unions that were included in a draft of the newspaper advertisement didn’t sign on to the final version, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
The Service Employees International Union, led by Andy Stern, didn’t sign either version of the ad.
Stern said in an e-mailed statement that his union’s 2.1 million members will work to make sure health legislation “is worthy of their support and truly makes health care affordable for all Americans.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Holly Rosenkrantz in Washington at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: October 14, 2009 09:03 EDT
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