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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Organized labor across the country is now setting its sights on housing costs as rents and mortgages continue to soar
As housing has become a top issue in strikes and protests in recent months, US unions are pushing for change and backing innovative solutions for the housing affordability crisis.
With US house prices and rents rising in recent years, and high interest rates and inflation taking their toll, housing affordability has become a major issue at the bargaining table for US labor unions. Many workers are facing 60-, 90-, even 120-minute commutes to work because they cannott afford to live near their jobs.
Housing has been a big issue in the recent rolling strikes by thousands of Los Angeles hotel workers. In Oregon, 400 Yamhill county government employees went on strike in November because, the union said, “many workers are not able to afford housing”. In the Twin Cities, worker dismay about large rent hikes is fueling plans for a multi-union strike by up to 30,000 workers in March. When San Francisco hotel workers hold contract talks later this year, housing affordability will be a top issue.
If it’s not bigger it’s the next smaller.
Another thing single-payer healthcare would do is lower the cost of literally all goods and services because it would cut out what is for virtually any business one of their greatest expenses, and that the portion of workers’ comp. premiums they have to pay to provide their employees with healthcare when they get injured on the job.
That premium is itself inflated by the cost of all these insurers and third party administrators jockeying over who is a primary payer and who is secondary and who is a no payer and who gets subrogation from who, who gets setoffs against who, who administers the claims, how they apportion the liability, etc. Fucking get rid of all of it and just cover every person all of the time for any reason. In this context and this line if reasoning it’s referred to as 24/7 coverage, but it means the same thing: single payer. Also right now the costs are artificially inflated by the fact that so many people are uninsured or underinsured, so the medical providers have to charge the insured people three times the price.
It’s insane. My friends: we are already paying the price we’re just not getting the benefit, it’s going to health insurance companies, hospital owners, and large physicians groups.