U.S. Labor News Roundup

Week of July 22, 2013

We're Taxing the Rich... and So Can You

Common wisdom had it that “you can’t raise taxes,” so the public sector has been starved for money.

But voters in California raised $6 billion last November, mostly through an income tax hike on rich people, along with a tiny sales tax increase of ¼ percent.

The California Federation of Teachers (CFT) pulled together labor and community groups to craft Proposition 30, to raise the revenue needed for schools and services. We funded polls and focus groups, testing how likely various types of taxes would be to gain a majority.

Regressive taxes—like sales taxes and across-the-board income tax hikes—were viewed unfavorably. The public believed, however, that the rich and large corporations needed to pay their fair share for the common good.

Millions of dollars in opposition ads did their best to confuse the voters, calling Proposition 30 “a massive tax increase on everyone.”

CFT’s coalition emphasized the “tax the rich” message because we knew it worked. Eventually, we convinced the governor, too, to say “those who are blessed with the most wealth” should “give back a little bit so everyone could benefit.”

Proposition 30 won 55 percent to 45 percent. It is the single largest progressive tax passed in California since World War II.

What are some lessons?

We can beat back the core conservative idea—that the government can’t do anything right—because the public understands that economic inequality is growing.

Caregivers Fight Privatizers in New York Hospitals

News websites began reporting Brooklyn’s Long Island College Hospital (LICH) dead on July 19. Management owned up to a secret plan to ship out all remaining patients over the next two days and lay off all staff in 30 days.

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But by evening, tables had turned. Health care workers picketed in an emergency rally. The crowd cheered the delivery of a judge’s temporary restraining order barring the closure.

When administrators tried to remove patients the next day anyway, workers called the cops.

It was one of several dramatic turnabouts in an ongoing war over the future of Brooklyn’s hospitals.

LICH sits on prime real estate in a gentrifying part of Brooklyn. That’s why its owner, the State University of New York (SUNY), wants to close it down, workers charge. To developers—who’d like to put condos there—the hospital would be worth more dead than alive.

New York’s hospitals are jam-packed. Brooklyn—which has 2.5 million inhabitants, almost as many as Chicago—is already underserved. LICH is turning ambulances away.

and making the situation worse.

Hospital supporters want to find a new operator to take over LICH and keep it open—but the right kind of operator. They rallied in June against state legislators’ efforts to allow private investors to take over certain hospitals. It’s not currently legal for for-profit companies to own hospitals in New York.

Neither bill passed this session. “For-profit health care kills,” said Jill Furillo, of the New York State Nurses Association.

Private equity’s business model is to borrow large sums, buy up companies, pay off the debt by slashing costs—especially workers’ pay and benefits—and pay out big dividends with what’s left over, then sell off the ruined husk of the company. It’s a ruthless way of making a lot of money fast.

It’s clear any for-profit hospital experiments will target LICH and other struggling Brooklyn hospitals in low-income communities of color, nurses say.

“We won’t let our patients suffer so that Wall Street investors can make more money,” Furillo said.