Despite a high-profile role in putting Democrats in control of the White House and Congress for unions, their priorities have taken a back seat in the Obama administration, causing tension between Democrats and organized labor that came to a head with a proposal to tax employee health care benefits.
The Laborers International Union of North America on Tuesday began airing advertisements in Montana and North Dakota, targeting two top Democratic senators who are writing a massive health care overhaul bill. The union, made up of 500,000 workers and affiliated with the much larger AFL-CIO, is angry that Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D., appear ready to write a bill that would tax employee health care benefits. Such a move would be costly to many union workers whose contracts include comprehensive health plans.
The union ad is unusual not only because it attacks a provision in the effort to reform health care, but it pits the organization against the very Democrats they worked hard to elect.
“Regardless of how they slice it, it’s an unpopular idea and as it was starting to gain traction in the Senate, we decided to take action,” LIUNA spokesman Jacob Hay said.
For all of their campaign help last summer and fall, the returns have been somewhat lackluster for unions. In addition to having to put up a fight on the health care front, unions have watched fall by the wayside a bill that would enable them to organize more easily. Opposition from moderate Democrats and President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to push Congress resulted in a watered-down version of a bill originally aimed at helping labor unions bolster their dwindling ranks.
Union officials are taking a much more aggressive stance with the proposal to tax health care benefits.
The union agreed Tuesday to pull the ads after Baucus promised to personally sit down and discuss the health care benefits tax proposal with LIUNA President Terry O’Sullivan.
O’Sullivan sent a letter to Baucus earlier this month, describing union workers as “enraged” at the proposal to tax benefits, adding that such a tax “is not what working people voted for.”
While the ads have been halted in Montana and North Dakota, LIUNA described the suspension as “temporary” and has begun airing such an ad in Iowa, home to Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican negotiator on the health care bill.
“It’s dead on arrival for us, so that is pretty clear,” Hay said.
The actions of LIUNA contrast with the Service Employees International Union, which has remained largely silent on the health care benefits tax. Union representatives say they are “not inclined” to support taxing employee health benefits but Obama’s close relationship with SEIU President Andrew Stern all but guarantees the organization will refrain from LIUNA-style ad campaign.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with our relationship with the president,” SEIU representative Lori Lodes responded. “It has more to do with the process playing out in Congress, which has yet to put out language about what they are proposing.”
