Working Together - Health, Retirement and Job Security - All On the Line

It's not about lipstick or Paris Hilton - the Wall Street financial meltdown boldly underscored the fact that "it's the economy" once again in this election. And it's no exaggeration to say that the whole concept of a broad and growing middle class is at stake.

For CWA members, all of our key issues are on the line: protecting our health care, our jobs, our retirement security and maintaining and building our collective bargaining strength. In the critical presidential race, the contrast between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama on these issues is stark.

With his health plan, McCain is very open about his intent to destroy employer-based health coverage and push more people into the private insurance market to negotiate coverage on their own rather than as part of a group. To do that, he would eliminate the income tax exemption on employer-paid health benefits - directly raising taxes for most CWA families and millions of others.

The chart on page 5 shows examples of how our members' tax burden would soar under the McCain proposal, even with the minimal tax credit he would offer of $2,500 for an individual and $5,000 for a family - far less than the average cost of health insurance premiums.

The McCain plan would ratchet up the pressure we face at the bargaining table to preserve our employer-paid benefits, while doing very little if anything to protect retiree health care or extend health coverage to the 45 million uninsured Americans.

Barack Obama shares our view that America needs a national program to provide affordable health insurance coverage to all, and in a way that would help preserve, not destroy, our current coverage.

McCain 10 years ago strongly embraced deregulation of the banking and insurance industries, which led to the recent collapse of major banks and the nation's largest insurance company, but despite the Wall Street crisis he clings to the notion - shared by the Bush administration - that deregulation and market-based approaches will solve all social ills.

McCain extends that philosophy to Social Security, continuing to push the Bush concept of privatizing the system with individual accounts invested in the stock market. The current market panic and plunging stock values should make the riskiness of that approach quite clear.

McCain's economic program and plan for job creation likewise is rooted in a belief that handing even greater tax breaks to corporations - a 10-percent cut - along with unrestricted free trade deals will deliver prosperity and jobs. These are the policies we've had for the past eight years, and which destroyed hundreds of thousands of good jobs lost to outsourcing and caused a loss in family income for the working middle class while CEOs and big investors grew richer.

Obama would push to eliminate tax breaks that encourage corporations to shift their operations overseas - tax breaks McCain supported in the Senate - and negotiate standards protecting workers in future trade agreements. His plan to strengthen the economy and create jobs calls for investing in rebuilding roads, bridges, schools and other vital infrastructure and accelerated funding for development of fuel-efficient cars and green energy production.

When McCain was recently blasted for saying that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound" - even as our government was preparing the biggest Wall Street bailout in history to avert an economic collapse - he backpedaled by claiming he was referring to productive American workers as the fundamentals.

That's a preposterous statement from a man who throughout his career has attacked policies to raise living standards for workers, stem job outsourcing and reform workers' rights.

McCain opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, the one measure that would do the most to restore the organizing and bargaining rights of workers and bolster the middle class. He voted 19 times against minimum wage increases and voted to weaken labor unions by backing a national right to work law and supporting permanent replacement of strikers.

By contrast, Obama strongly supports Employee Free Choice and pledges to restore the role of the Department of Labor, which he says has become "the Department of Management" under the Bush administration.

The articles and charts in this issue of CWA News further lay out the sharply different positions between these candidates - and why the stakes are huge for our members and all working families. I urge you to use this material in discussions with friends and coworkers and encourage them to vote for "Change We Can Believe In" on November 4.

(Vea página 11 para la traducción en español.)