Commentary —

Employers Nibbling Away At Worker Benefits

By William A. Collins

So-so job,

With lousy pay:

Now my health care’s,

Gone away.

It’s easy to believe that Wal-Mart, because of its high profile, is the sole employer treating its workers shabbily. But that is not the case. True, Wal-Mart may be the poster child, but plenty of other bosses have gotten into the swing of abuse too.

Every level of government, for example, is deep into outsourcing. New London is one of the latest, looking to get rid of its garbage workers in favor of a private collector. Then there would no longer be a union or civilized benefits to pay for. Janitorial services in public buildings have long gone this private route. Such workers now are almost exclusively immigrants, with no one paying much attention to their legal status. No attention at all is paid to their treatment.

The District 18 Regional School District has become even more creative. It’s reduced many full-time employees to 30 hours per week, suddenly rendering them part-time. As you might guess, this means they no longer qualify for health care. And district food service has been outsourced completely.

In my town, the Norwalk Doubletree Hotel nominally changed hands, closed for a while for renovation, and then reopened hiring all new workers. The goal was apparently to stiff the union. That move is understandably being challenged before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

But the new-look NLRB is what has emboldened so many employers to lay siege to their staffs in the first place. President Bush has spent five years repopulating the board with anti-union members, just as he has done with the Labor Department. Thus, employers now feel pretty secure that their behavior is likely to be winked at as unions appeal up the ladder. Protection against union busting has all but disappeared.

Aiding and abetting this trend is the press. While every newspaper and TV news show flaunts a business segment, none gives space to labor. This is scarcely a surprise since business advertises and labor doesn’t. Thus there are no reporters regularly investigating working conditions or cataloging the gradual diminution of benefits.

The results of this steady nibbling away at employee rights are therefore obscured to the public until some state or nonprofit survey reports a “startling new” discovery. Typically, this is the revelation that fewer workers enjoy employer-paid health insurance, and that more have signed up for taxpayer-paid Husky and Medicaid. Perhaps the most damaging disclosure about Wal-Mart was the outside finding that many of its employees receive such low wages that they qualify for public benefits.

Hoping to avoid throwing still more state workers into this private employment jungle, this year the heavily Democratic legislature passed new rules deterring the outsourcing of government work. The governor, however, vetoed the bill and the Dems lacked the votes to override.

Meanwhile similar battles rage in Washington. The national Chamber of Commerce is seeking to weaken the Family and Medical Leave Act, and Wal-Mart is lobbying to stretch a trucker’s workday from 14 to 16 hours. In addition, the NLRB has ruled that graduate teaching assistants have no right to unionize.

The results of this trend are now fairly plain. Median family income among Nutmeggers is drifting downward, and the prevalence of lost health insurance is drifting upward. In this national era of corporate dominance, our state has acquiesced in that trend and done little to fend off the abuse of its own workers.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)