Working Together - Presidential Choice: Who Will Stand with the Middle Class?

Annie Hill, Executive Vice President

In this issue of CWA News, we try to get right down to the core issues in this year's presidential race and what a change in political direction can mean for our members and their families in so many ways. 

This isn't about Democrats and Republicans, it's about electing a presidential candidate who will push for economic policies to restore and bolster the middle class.

There's a clear difference between the philosophies of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama and their proposed solutions for reviving the economy and addressing fundamental problems, such as our broken health care system, Social Security, jobs and trade, suppression of workers' rights, soaring energy costs and more.

Senator McCain's economic plan is primarily more of the Bush-Cheney model: Extension of tax cuts for the wealthy and giving even bigger tax breaks to corporations. It's the trickle-down idea — shift more wealth to the economic elites, the ones that made out obscenely well the last 71/2 years while workers' wages stagnated, and supposedly everything will be fine for the rest of us.

We've tried that approach and it's been disastrous for working Americans.

A policy of unrestrained "free trade" during the last decade has sent millions of jobs to cheap labor markets and created a huge trade deficit. In fact, our trade deficit with China alone cost the United States 2.3 million jobs from 2001-07, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

The presidential candidates differ sharply on this issue. John McCain thinks NAFTA was a good deal and has supported every trade agreement that has come along including the pending deal with Colombia. Obama has stated that NAFTA needs to be fixed and he opposes the Colombia deal. He pledges that any future trade agreements under his presidency must contain strong labor standards to protect workers.

On health care, McCain's plan echoes Bush's approach of calling on people to take "ownership" of their health care and negotiate their own insurance coverage, with modest tax incentives from the government. McCain would offer tax credits of up to $5,000 for a family — less than half the average cost of health premiums. Workers would have to make up the difference. He would do nothing about requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions who are often refused coverage.

But most disturbing, McCain proposes making workers whose health benefits are paid in whole or part by employers start paying income tax on the value of those benefits — in effect a tax increase of thousands of dollars for many CWA members and others.

Obama would not tax benefits, and instead he proposes a national health program aimed at providing universal and affordable coverage and measures to contain costs and improve the quality of medical care.

I hope you will look at the stories and candidate comparison chart in this issue and familiarize yourself with the different positions between McCain and Obama on other key issues, such as retirement security and workers' rights. McCain supports the idea of at least partial privatization of Social Security, putting individual retirement funds at risk in financial markets, while Obama has pledged to preserve the current Social Security structure with minor payroll tax increases on those earning above $250,000.

McCain strongly opposes the Employee Free Choice Act to give workers a majority signup process to achieve union representation and collective bargaining. Obama has promised to work for passage of the bill.

At the presidential level, this certainly is not an election year where anyone can say convincingly, "I don't see any real difference between the candidates." Look at their positions on the issues and their ideas for the future, and judge for yourself which candidate will benefit, or hurt, our jobs, benefits and living standards.