2006 offers opportunities for vision, mobilization,
action—and change

It’s the AFT’s representational duty to engage in political and legislative action. After all, elected officials hold the ultimate authority over your work—and your livelihood.

They determine budgets and set funding levels for public services and programs. They make policy that can change how you do your job.

They determine what rights you have in the workplace, including collective bargaining.

And they enact tax policy that ultimately affects revenues for government services and the availability of funding for your salaries and benefits.

Political and legislative engagement is a priority. At every level of the union, leaders and staff are on a perpetual mission to advocate and represent the interests of public employees—and the work you do—in political and legislative arenas.

In order to do that, the union needs perspective—the big picture—of what actions the federal governmnet takes, or is considering, that will trickle down to the state and local levels.

Perspective on the future of fiscal federalism. That’s what was gained at the 13th annual Funding State Services Conference sponsored by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

During the two-day conference in Bethesda, Md., Nov. 14-15, progressive public policy experts outlined the current fiscal and policy climate and the undercurrents that will move policy initiatives and fiscal decisions at both the state and federal levels in 2006.

Among the more than 250 attendees were more than a dozen leaders and staff from AFT Public Employees locals, state federations and national headquarters. The conference has become a mainstay on the AFT Public Employees calendar because it is a one-stop forum where many of the union’s priorities are discussed, including strategies to advocate for quality public services and counter attempts to undermine government programs and services that benefit the nation as a whole.

The mood of America: 2005
While AFT Public Employees leaders, staff and members engage in political and legislative action to direct policy agendas in support of quality public services, the union also needs to educate the public about policy consequences.

The union’s efforts on this front are having positive effects. Guy Molyneux of Peter D. Hart Research Associates shared with conference attendees responses to non-partisan surveys conducted over the past year. Among those survey findings:

■ Forty-four percent of Americans said the government should do more when they were asked for their views on the government’s role in the country’s problems.

■ Sixty-one percent said the government is too concerned with big corporations and wealthy special interests.

■ Fifty-three percent said that the Bush administration’s tax cuts have not been worth it because they have increased the deficit and have resulted in government program cuts.

■ Forty-eight percent said they would prefer that the November 2006 elections result in a Democrat-controlled Congress. (In October 2004, Americans were evenly split on the question: 44 percent said they would prefer a Democrat-controlled Congress and 44 percent said they would prefer a Republican-controlled Congress.)

■ Sixty-nine percent said they would like
the next president to advance different policies and priorities from those of the Bush administration.

Healthcare for the few or healthcare for all
Among the Bush administration’s priorities is consumer-driven healthcare.

As healthcare costs continue to skyrocket, the issues of accessibility and affordability have become more wide-
spread, amplifying the faulty logic of the consumer-driven theory: It does nothing about cost, which also determines accessibility.

With the growing number of uninsured Americans at all socio-economic and employment levels, healthcare has reached crisis proportions requiring a government response, speakers said.

“We can’t solve the problem through an employer-provided system,” said Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), who says proponents of healthcare reform are increasingly being joined by the business sector.

“Healthcare,” he noted, “is crippling industries in a competitive sense. Industries can’t afford the view they took with the Clinton [administration’s] healthcare plan. They didn’t want to give Democrats a victory.”

In the absence of meaningful healthcare policy at the federal level, which is not in the Bush administration’s playbook, speakers said, more Americans will join the rolls of the uninsured.

The irony is that as the number of citizens without adequate healthcare coverage—or no healthcare coverage at all—increases, the Bush administration continues its efforts to whittle away at the healthcare safety net: Medicaid.

Governors of a growing number of states have sought Medicaid waivers, which fall nicely into the Bush administration’s overall plan of getting the federal government out of the social safety-net business.

Waivers carry substantive consequences, says Joan Alker of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. Lawmakers may say they want the waivers so they can tailor or limit benefits to reflect their respective state’s population, she warned. “But the nature of waivers is to limit benefits and raise [federal-state] cost sharing.”

Currently, the federal government matches state Medicaid spending up to 75 cents on every dollar spent. One common provision the federal government seeks in waiver agreements is budget neutrality to guarantee that states will not spend more federal money.

On a positive note, Alker said that many legislators “are increasingly recognizing that these waivers will have important budget implications [because] Medicaid is the largest source of federal money in state budgets.”

From the big picture perspective, Barbara Postman of Vermont’s Children’s Forum said that advocates for quality public services need to link Medicare reform to healthcare reform. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Living standards of working families on decline
When President Bush talks about the growing economy, he is really talking about the increase in productivity—the measure of output per hour.

For members of AFT Public Employees, as well as other workers across the country who have been doing more work with less—fewer resources, stagnant pay and declining employer-provided benefits—the fact that productivity is up has no correlation to the quality of their lives.

The administration’s dependence on productivity numbers as the nation’s singular measure for the state of the economy is misguided—and misleading.

According to EPI’s Jared Bernstein, 2004 data show the “largest gap on record between productivity and hourly [total] compensation—living standards.”

It doesn’t have to be this way, Bernstein said, making a comparison between worker-friendly COSTCO and worker-exploiter Wal-Mart.

COSTCO, he said, is an example of a company that has accomplished increased productivity with increased labor costs. “There is an efficiency [gain],” he said, “including less turnover.”

Moreover, poverty rates, which declined under the Clinton administration, have risen, and unemployment continues to drag the overall well-being of the nation.

“The unemployment rate is 5 percent nationally,” he said. “One reason it is relatively low is because a lot of people dropped out of the workforce.” The job growth that has occurred, he noted, is largely related to private sector jobs in the defense industry.

The under-employment rate is more significant, Bernstein noted. It is closer to 9 percent and is composed of workers who want to work full time or who are working in jobs below their skill levels.

It’s time, he said, to aggressively advance an alternative vision: “We’re all in this together.”