Surprising wins for workers and women this week
Surprising wins for workers and women this week
Unless you're on Medicaid or live in Arkansas
Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.
Now that we’re somehow just about halfway through the year, the news is starting to get a little bit scattered. Some legislatures are rushing to finish up work for the year, state supreme courts are handing down decisions, election candidate fields begin to take shape, and people have to start living with the consequences of the very flawed people that run governments.
Today’s newsletter has a variety of news items, like a buffet of current events. We’re talking good news, bad news, some triggered right-wingers, and teeth. Yes, teeth!
What We’re Tracking
Organized Labor: It’s been a pretty solid week for the American worker, relatively speaking.
On Wednesday, I broke the news over at More Perfect Union that Starbucks for the first time agreed to a financial settlement with the NLRB and union workers over allegations of unfair labor practices. They didn’t really have much of a choice: Last fall, managers in Seattle deliberately and very openly prevented workers from unionized stores to work lucrative after-hours shifts running the Starbucks cart at University of Washington football games.
There almost didn’t need to be lawyers involved, because the emails and Facebook posts in which managers insisted that union members were being punished for protected activity. The criminal activity itself also served as the confession.
I was in the Senate hearing room at the end of March when Howard Schultz angrily barked that neither Starbucks nor the union-busting lawyers that they deployed across the country had ever broken a single labor law, even the ones that administrative law judges found them guilty of breaking. He looked possessed by a demonic force of indignity, but if this evidence had been laid out for the Senate right then and there, I think even he’d acknowledge the wrongdoing.
The Starbucks campaign first launched in the summer of 2021 and hit its apex last summer, before Schultz’s return to the company ushered in all those labor violations that he insists didn’t happen. This summer is kicking off with the WGA strike and a potential SAG-AFTRA strike, and as important as they are, they’re going to seem like mere opening acts should the 350,000 Teamsters working at UPS mount picket lines across the country on August 1st.
The union this week took a major step toward what would be the largest private employer strike in US history when 97% of participating Teamsters voted to authorize the action. To put that number into context, the union’s last contract with the company didn’t even receive 50% support when members voted on it in 2018.
That longtime union president James Hoffa, Jr. pushed the lousy agreement to ratification over the wishes of a majority of UPS-employed Teamsters is a large part of why striking for a new and far improved contract is such a popular proposition for active members. They’re already beginning to win concessions, too, as UPS this week folded on its refusal to provide air conditioning in delivery trucks. If they get a CBA done, drivers won’t have to sweat to death. Some incentive.
I’ll be on this for as long as it lasts this summer; for an overview of the major issues at play and how the union and company got to this dire point, check out this piece I reported, wrote, and produced for MPU.
Amid all the other news this week, the NLRB quietly issued a ruling that could and should trigger a massive change to how employers of all sizes treat many of their employees, starting with being forced to consider them employees in the first place.
Specifically, the board decided that makeup artists, wig artists, and hairstylists who work at the Atlanta Opera are full-time employees and thereby eligible to form a union. The case turned on a number of different factors, including how much it should matter whether or not the plaintiffs had “entrepreneurial opportunities” outside of their work for the opera.
The NLRB found that the “entrepreneurial opportunities” test should not outweigh other factors. Instead, the board must take a more holistic approach that considers an array of different questions. As in virtually every other workplace, the only difference between a full-time worker and a contractor is often that the employer didn’t want to provide benefits or job security.
This could theoretically be a game-changer for gig workers. Uber drivers and DoorDash delivery people, construction workers, and home health aides have been exploited for years using this loophole. Gig work is inherently isolating, especially when it involves driving alone for long stretches of time, but many have had great success organizing anyway.
Medicaid: The Great Abandonment continues apace. As of Thursday, at least 1.2 million low-income Americans across 21 states have been kicked off their health insurance plan.
States like Arkansas and Florida have made it a priority to tear access to doctors away from as many people as possible, as quickly as possible; it’s practically new Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders’s signature achievement six months into her reign. Of the 40,000 Arkansas that were kicked off Medicaid last month, an astoundingly immoral 35,000 lost their healthcare coverage because they had not completed the required paperwork.
We live in a country that preaches personal responsibility while doing everything to sabotage the people who are already structurally disadvantaged. Recognizing the burdens placed on working people, the federal government instructed states to make every effort to contact Medicaid enrollees and verify their eligibility, and gave them a full year to do so.
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a law in 2021 that required the state to do it in six months, but Huckabee-Sanders’ remorseless cleaving machine is far outpacing even that expedited timeline.
When experts estimated that the end-of-pandemic unwinding could put up to 15 million people at risk of losing their Medicaid, they likely did not factor in the brutality of governors like Huckabee-Sanders and Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has overseen an even bigger bloodletting.
The Biden administration, which agreed to authorize the purges as part of a budget deal last December, sent a letter this week urging states to chill out on so eagerly cutting people off from their doctors and prescription medications as soon as possible. It didn’t seem to occur to the White House that it’s bad politics for a president to be in office when 15-20 million people — many of whom are part of the Democratic coalition — lose their lifeline to health care.
New Good News
Iowa: In something of a pleasant surprise, the Iowa Supreme Court defied Gov. Kim Reynolds and permanently blocked a law passed in 2018 that would have banned abortion after six weeks. It was hardly an emphatic or even reassuring ruling, as the court’s 3-3 deadlock — one recent Reynolds appointee was recused — resulted in a failure to overturn a district court’s injunction against the law.
At this point, Iowanas are free to obtain abortion care up through the 20th week of pregnancy, but they’re not totally out of the woods yet. Last year, the state Supreme Court overturned what had been an absolute protected right to an abortion in Iowa, and with a Republican trifecta, Reynolds will definitely come after it again.
Bullying works: Earlier this week, LGBTQ+ activists discovered that on June 21st, a lie-filled, anti-trans documentary called No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care was scheduled to screen at AMC Theatres across the country.
A few online petitions, some angry tweets, and whispers of a boycott later, AMC has officially pulled the movie from the schedule. Conservatives are predictably losing their minds over the company’s decision, declaring that their rights have been violated and their voices censored. That these are the same people who are trying to bankrupt Target and any other company that shows the slightest respect for the LGBTQ+ community is beyond ironic, but also misses the point.
Republicans used their fake concerns about school sports and age-appropriate books to earn some credibility to launder their unbridled homophobia back into the mainstream media and popular culture of sorts. They were of course helped by the mainstream media, who now present hate speech and abusive ignore or engage with hate speech and as legitimate political positions.
There has to be some standard of decency and morality for even the most adamant of “objective” journalists, because otherwise, evil and discrimination become normalized and the freedom to simply exist grows increasingly precarious.
Insurance Bites
Our eight-month-old son is going through a particularly difficult patch of teething, a process that is as awful to watch as everyone you’ve ever met tells you it will be a few months before it begins. You can buy crates of cute rings and colorful squishy things for the baby to gnaw on, and we now have a freezer full of them, but the reality is that there’s only so much you can do to alleviate the pain.
It’s just a nasty and protracted process, and it feels especially cruel for months of random searing pains to be an unavoidable rite of passage for wide-eyed infants who are only just becoming conscious to the world. The silver lining is that it happens too early to leave a permanent traumatic memory, though dental care doesn’t tend to get all that much easier as you age. I’m scheduled for a dentist appointment next week, and even with what’s supposed to be excellent dental insurance, I’ve already been told that the routine procedure that I evidently need will cost somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand dollars (I blacked out when I heard the precise number).
National attention has long been on the cost of healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and rightly so, but the dental care industry is also starting to draw scrutiny and government intervention.
Last November, voters in Massachusetts overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that called for limiting egregious dental insurance profiteering. Now, insurers must spend at least 83% of premiums on patient care and efforts to improve the quality of that care. Should they fail to reach that threshold, they’ll be required to issue refunds to customers.
The initiative also gave the state the ability to block unreasonably high premium hikes, sealing off any attempts by insurers to make patients pay for the new regulations.
This kind of regulation is standard for health insurance, and its passage for dental coverage in Massachusetts has already prompted legislators in several other states to pursue similar laws. In next-door Rhode Island, a bill introduced in March would require 85% of premiums to go toward patient care. The bill, though “held for further study,” is still a live item, and is being pushed hard by the state chapter of the American Dental Association.
The dental lobby isn’t using its considerable influence simply out of a principled belief in consumer wellbeing, but if bigger and easier payouts for dentists mean they’re more likely to take insurance, provide flexibility to patients, and feel more able to accept Medicaid, it the ADA should feel free to keep the pressure on.
The insurance industry spares no expense when it comes to lobbyists (hence the need for this kind of law), so it may not pass this year; a similar bill also fell by the wayside in Illinois earlier this spring. Just introducing it is a victory, though, as these sorts of reforms, which come with little fundraising upside and hardly pump up the crowd in a stump speech, can take years to get passed.
Last month, New York State settled a federal class action lawsuit by agreeing to significantly improve the state Medicaid system’s dental coverage. Medicaid will now cover the costs of root canals, crowns, tooth implants, and replacement dentures when deemed medically necessary. The upshot is that more than five million low-income New Yorkers will now be able to receive the vital care that they have likely been denied for so many years, and for many, the results will be life-changing.
Dental coverage was added to New Hampshire’s Medicaid program for the first time ever this spring, an important milestone that’s especially politically noteworthy due to the fact that the state is currently run by a Republican trifecta.
Adding these benefits is clearly a winning political issue: Even Republicans in Kentucky had to find a lame excuse for twice shooting down Gov. Andy Beshear’s regulatory efforts to permanently add vision, dental, and hearing coverage to the state’s Medicaid program.
“This deficiency vote has nothing to do with the regulation itself,” promised Republican state Sen. Steve, co-chair of the Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee. “As far as expanded dental services, I think every single person up here on this committee would be in support of expanded dental services. I don’t think there’s any question about that. But our job in this committee is to protect the legislative process and protect the legislative branch and our role in the process.”
Over the course of just a few months’ time, the temporary expansion of Medicaid benefits in Kentucky has proven to be an extraordinarily impactful investment in the state’s working people. As of two weeks ago, more than 60,000 Medicaid patients were able to obtain glasses, 5600 people got dental crowns, and 1200 members received dentures. Those numbers will at least grow for a little while longer, as the expansion will remain in place until the next legislative session.
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