My Position on Health Care Benefits and Collective Bargaining Rights for City Workers

By John F Earl

This is the text of a speech that I had planned to give to the City Council last winter during the dispute between the Municipal Employees Association and the city over health care benefits. I did not give the speech, however, because a last minute agreement was reached prior to the public comments section of the meeting. Still, the text expresses my general views on how to deal with the cost of health care benefits and collective bargaining rights for city employees.

My name is John Earl.

I am a resident of Huntington Beach and for the past 20 years I have benefited on countless occasions and in many ways from the fine services provided to me by the hard working—union—employees of our city.

Tonight I support them as they have always supported me and 200,000 other HB residents—publicly, enthusiastically and sincerely.

I urge the city administration and city council to show the same respect to our hardworking, efficient and irreplaceable city employees.

The first step you should take toward that goal is to fully recognize the collective bargaining rights of the city employees by negotiating with them in good faith so that a just solution to the present labor dispute can be reached for all.

The right to organize a union and to use that union to negotiate for good working conditions, decent wages and benefits, including health care, is a fundamental human right recognized by international treaties and American law.

We should all be thankful for that right, because by exercising it in the past union members have created prosperity and social justice where it never did, nor never would have, existed otherwise.

Every work related right that every worker in America has ever had or ever will have, however mistakenly taken for granted it may be, was the direct result of the past struggles of union members like those in the audience here tonight.

Their struggle to derive decent and affordable health care from a health care system that values corporate profit more than human life is a struggle shared by all workers.

We’ve seen how the grocery store chains have used that system to try to create envy by some workers of others in order to divide, weaken and mislead them into thinking that their struggles for a better life are unrelated.

But they are not unrelated. If the city employees loose their union rights and their right to affordable and decent health care, we all lose.

The council should respect the rights of our employees and negotiate fairly with them to assure that they maintain the best possible health care benefits.

That’s the short term goal.

After that, however, the city council, residents of Huntington Beach and its employees should work together to find a replacement for a health care system that soaks the working person with bills and constant worry and weakens the bargaining strength of unions, thus hurting us all, while making a few people very rich.

We need to discard that system in favor of a single-payer health care system that unites workers, disarms corporations and city administrators of a union-busting tool and provides affordable and quality health care for all.

A system based on mutual caring, not greed.

To that end, I urge this council, everyone, to take a public stand in support of California Senate bill 921 sponsored by state senator Sheila Kuehl – which is the only true universal health care bill to be introduced in California that would make the kind of labor disputes over health care that currently exist between grocery workers and their employers and city workers and their employer a thing of the past.