Can SEIU Help Vermonters Win Single Payer? 

by Steve Early 

Fri, 06/22/2012 

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2012/06/can-seiu-help-vermonters-win-single-payer


While the nation waits for an overdue Supreme Court
decision that will decide the fate of President Obama's
Affordable Care Act, another health care drama with
wide implications for universal health care is just
starting in Vermont.

Prodded by a strong grassroots movement, the Vermont
legislature voted last year for a single-payer state
health care system where every citizen will eventually
be eligible for publicly funded health care.

The new system will take five or six years to fund and
implement, however, between phasing out existing
insurance arrangements, overcoming legal obstacles,
dealing with provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and
finding the money to pay for it all.

Meanwhile, the local business community, private
insurance companies, and right-wing PACs have regrouped
and counterattacked, with non-stop advertising. They're
doing their well-funded best to make sure that single
payer never happens in this state or any other. They
know that a lot can change, politically and in the
state budget, between now and final implementation of
Vermont's health care law, particularly in a state with
two-year gubernatorial terms. Business-Backed
Counterattack

Last year's overhaul was backed by Governor Peter
Shumlin, a multimillionaire businessman who faces
re-election this year after narrowly winning office in
2010.

Single payer continues to poll well in the state,
despite its lack of concrete benefits for even one
Vermonter so far--a weakness that conservative opponents
are exploiting in their campaign of disinformation and
fear-mongering. A recent poll conducted by several
Vermont media found nearly 48 percent of those surveyed
still favor single payer; 36 percent are opposed.

Shumlin is likely to defeat GOP candidate Randy Brock,
whose top adviser is Darcie Johnston, founder of
Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, a key conduit for
anti-single-payer propaganda, financed by business.

But even if Brock and fellow Shumlin critic Wendy
Wilton, who is running for state treasurer, lose this
fall, progressives fear they will spread doubt about
reform. As a centerpiece of her campaign, Wilton
predicts that Vermont will be running budget deficits
above $2 billion by 2018 if "Green Mountain Care"
becomes a reality. Right-wingers also warn about the
new taxes everyone will be required to pay. 'Air War'
for Single Payer?

To counter conservative attacks, Shumlin and friends
will soon unveil "Vermont Leads: Single Payer Now!,"
their own vehicle for advertising and door-to-door
canvassing in favor of Green Mountain Care. This new
addition to the existing constellation of health care
reform groups will spend more than $100,000 on a
six-month drive "to engage and activate Vermonters
through media and grassroots organizing."

According to Peter Sterling, an experienced local
political operative who was just named director of the
group, "more is expected in 2013 for TV ads," when the
legislature reconvenes.

Unfortunately, Vermont Leads doesn't draw on the
formidable grassroots network created since 2008 by the
Vermont Workers' Center--and seems designed to bypass
the group, which is the state's most influential
single-payer advocate. The VWC's "Health Care Is a
Human Right" Campaign has been widely credited, both
locally and nationally, with spearheading the
multi-year community-labor mobilization needed to pass
the legislation last year.

While working closely with Shumlin and key Democratic
legislators to achieve that goal, the Workers' Center
has also been willing to sound the alarm and swarm the
statehouse when things got off track. Last May, for
example, VWC organizers brought more than 1,500
Vermonters to the Capitol to thwart a bid by
legislative insiders to exclude undocumented workers
from the scope of the law.

The VWC has long received strong backing from unions
with members who live and work in Vermont--like the
United Electrical Workers, Communications Workers, and
Vermont Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals,
which bargains for most unionized health care workers
in the state.

In contrast, Vermont Leads is being funded by just one
union--the 1.9 million-member Service Employees, which
has no members working in the state and failed to
affiliate the still-independent Vermont State Employees
Association more than a decade ago. 'Working with
People Who Have Money!'

For Vermont Leads' volunteer board members, SEIU's
sudden arrival, with a wad of cash large by local
standards, is cause for some rejoicing. One new recruit
is former state AFL-CIO President Jill Charbonneau, a
postal worker, who noted in an email to friends that
she was "not used to working with people who have
money!"

Another Vermont Leads enthusiast is Middlebury College
anthropology professor Ellen Oxfeld, who has campaigned
under the banner of a small group known as Vermont for
Single Payer. SEIU funding is "a gift from heaven," she
told me. "We want to combat the lies, keep up the
momentum for single payer, and organize around the
financing package" to be adopted by legislators next
year.

Deb Richter, leader of Physicians for a National Health
Program in Vermont, gave similar reasons for joining
Vermont Leads. "We've got six more years of fighting to
do to keep this on track," she said. "We now have the
ability to spend more for ad campaigns and literature
drops. Instead of using existing groups, it made sense
to have this one be a separate entity."

As for SEIU, "they've always been single-payer
supporters," Richter asserted. "That's what I've been
told." Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth?

Others in single-payer circles wonder whether this
particular gift horse could become a Trojan horse that
will weaken Vermont's movement for health care as a
human right.

SEIU's sudden appearance in the state is worrisome to
union friends and political allies of the VWC, now in
the middle of its own fundraising drive to support an
energetic staff of eight who coordinate the work of
scores of volunteers around the state.

The VWC is enlisting nationally known figures for a
public statement of support titled "Vermont Can Lead
the Way." In an open letter soliciting 1,000 such
endorsers, VWC leaders argue that "we will never be
able to outspend giant healthcare profiteers and other
big money groups in an 'air war.' But we can
out-organize them on the ground!"

SEIU's lack of any members on the ground, plus its
unhelpful role nationally in health care reform from
the Clinton to the Obama eras, has led some labor
activists to question its motivation for becoming a
single-payer sugar daddy, virtually overnight.

One explanation involves SEIU's competition with AFSCME
to represent personal care attendants in Vermont.
Neither union can gain 5,000 new members in that
workforce without Shumlin and the legislature agreeing
to create a new homecare bargaining unit, plus some
sort of card check or election mechanism for union
recognition by the state.

And if Shumlin, in the meantime, needs to do some
back-pedaling on single payer--under pressure from
business interests--SEIU could easily provide political
cover for him, local activists fear. For the union, the
quid pro quo would be the governor favoring SEIU over
AFSCME to represent homecare workers. Bad Record
Elsewhere

Elsewhere in the U.S. and at the federal level, SEIU
has undercut other unions' attempts at single-payer
legislation (even though its own affiliates have passed
many pro-single payer resolutions over the years).

In California, SEIU lobbied against other unions'
attempts for single-payer legislation. Then-SEIU
President Andy Stern cooked up a plan with Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger that would have required all
Californians to buy private insurance but didn't
control the cost of that insurance and set no minimum
standards for coverage. Included in the bill was a fund
for homecare workers' health benefits--to be
administered by SEIU.

"SEIU played the leading advocacy role and ultimately
the lead compromise role on that bill," California
Nurses Association staffer Michael Lighty recalled.
"Stern went behind the back of the California State Fed
to cut the deal. But it didn't even pass in the state
senate. It lost the backing of labor. It could not
withstand the scrutiny."

In Massachusetts, SEIU affiliates have done little or
nothing to build Mass-Care, the main single-payer
advocacy organization. Instead, the union worked with
Ted Kennedy, then-Governor Mitt Romney, and the
coalition known as Health Care for All to enact the
state system of mandated private insurance that became
the model for the Affordable Care Act.

As one labor friend of Mass-Care notes, "SEIU has been
completely absorbed with Romneycare. For them, it's all
about hospital financing, never about changing the
system itself."

Similarly, SEIU helped run interference for the Obama
administration when it was working to keep single
payer--and ultimately, any public option--off the table
in 2009-2010.

Working with liberal foundations and other labor
groups, SEIU helped raise $40 million for a group
called Health Care for America Now. As David Moberg
from In These Times reported, HCAN's spending swamped
that of single-payer groups, while "promoting a
strategy closer to Obama's proposal that would include
employer-provided or individually purchased private
insurance."

In 2009, SEIU operatives even intervened at community
forums in New Hampshire held to discuss the Affordable
Care Act: they tried to prevent local PNHP supporters
from distributing pamphlets on single payer. SEIU's Man
with a Plan

Further fueling suspicions about SEIU's intentions in
Vermont are the multiple hats worn by recently arrived
national staffer Matt McDonald. His past assignments
have included trying to keep 45,000 Kaiser Permanente
hospital workers from fleeing SEIU in California and
joining the National Union of Healthcare Workers. In
2010, McDonald was part of an organizing team that
engaged in so much misconduct that the National Labor
Relations Board overturned the results of that
election.

McDonald set up Vermont Leads from scratch, made
himself a board member, and hired Sterling as its
director. Meanwhile, he is also masterminding SEIU's
attempt to create the new statewide bargaining unit for
personal care attendants, an effort that wisely
includes wooing advocates for the elderly and disabled
who receive such services. (For details on AFSCME's
homecare worker organizing in Vermont, which started
before SEIU arrived, see here.)

In response to an email seeking details on SEIU's
homecare organizing plans and the about-to-be-unveiled
Vermont Leads, McDonald replied that the questions
"threaten the dual goals of creating a single payer
system here in Vt., and the eventual unionization of
thousands of workers." Scramble for New Members

A slugfest between SEIU and AFSCME in Vermont would be
a throwback to the frenzied spending contests waged by
the same two unions over home-based workers in
2004-2005. In the process of obtaining "organizing
rights" deals in Illinois for both childcare and
homecare workers--and prevailing over AFSCME there--SEIU
became labor's biggest funder of Rod Blagojevich, the
Democratic governor whose illegal "pay to play" schemes
landed him in jail for 14 years.

As similar homecare or childcare units unravel in
several states under hostile GOP governors, SEIU is now
increasingly desperate for new members. A union that
was growing by 100,000 annually in 2006-2008 has hit
the wall, due to external enemies and its own internal
dysfunction.

In 2011, SEIU registered a net gain of only 7,000
members and agency fee-payers, as compared to 59,000
the previous year. So 5,000 new dues payers in Vermont
have become a more tempting prize than before, even if
they require a costly brawl with an AFL-CIO union that
already represents other public workers in the state.

For budgetary reasons, Vermont's Democratic-controlled
legislature balked at creating a new statewide
bargaining unit for publicly funded day care providers
earlier this year. This was a major, but hopefully not
permanent, setback for the Teachers (AFT), the state's
largest AFL-CIO union.

But Shumlin's passive role and the opposition of key
Democratic legislators doesn't bode well for AFSCME or
SEIU doing much better in homecare, as long as the two
unions remain divided. Price of a Relationship

The prospect of a homecare union war is not appealing
to others in Vermont labor, for multiple reasons.

"In my opinion, SEIU seems to be cultivating a direct
relationship with our governor by loyally supporting
his health care plan--including all the expected
compromises and retreats that may lie ahead," says
Traven Leyshon, secretary-treasurer of the Vermont
AFL-CIO. "This will create real problems for any of us
pushing for a stronger, more progressively financed
single-payer system than Shumlin favors."

Ellen David Friedman, a founder of the Vermont
Progressive Party and past organizer for the National
Education Association in the state, agrees. "SEIU makes
very short-term and opportunistic calculations," David
Friedman said. "They will help Shumlin get re-elected
in exchange for legislation authorizing homecare
unionization. My guess is that his position on single
payer really doesn't matter much to them, since they've
never really fought for it anywhere else."

State Senator Anthony Pollina, a Progressive Party
leader, worries that the wrong kind of pro-single payer
"air war," funded and directed from out of state, may
"encourage right-wing groups to come in and spend even
more money."

According to Pollina, "things could escalate into a
media campaign that leaves citizens on the sidelines,
just like past single-payer referendum campaigns that
were lost in Oregon or California." Like the Workers'
Center, he believes that "progressive grassroots
activists can 'out-organize' the opposition on the
ground but SEIU's invasion could end up undermining
this good work."

Richter and Oxfeld both insisted they would never let
this happen while they served as Vermont Leads board
members. "Vermont is a small place," Richter said. "If
it turns out SEIU is trying to push us in a different
direction, they won't have the ground troops to pull it
off." According to Oxfeld, "if they really try to get
in the way, I don't see anyone on the board going along
with it." Health Care History Repeats?

Three years ago, Michael Lighty from the CNA predicted
that creation of a publicly funded model plan,
providing universal coverage in an American state,
would "move us closer to a single-payer solution" than
the "public option" that labor wanted in the Affordable
Care Act until President Obama nixed it.

But Lighty warned that "if you pass a plan that's
watered down and bad, you've squandered the political
moment. You're going to fuel the cynicism and distrust
so many people already have in what can be accomplished
in Washington."

Health care reformers in Vermont are concerned that
SEIU will eventually play the same role locally that it
did nationally in 2009-2010. If that results in another
squandered political moment--this time leaving
Vermonters cynical and distrustful about what can be
accomplished in Montpelier--the repercussions will be
felt in every other state capital where progressives
still hope to improve on the Affordable Care Act.


Steve Early is a labor journalist who started writing
about Vermont politics when he was a Middlebury College
student in 1968. He spent three decades as a New
England representative for the Communications Workers,
assisting members in Vermont and other states with
strikes, contract negotiations, organizing, and health
care reform activity. He is the author, most recently,
of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, from Haymarket Books,
and a longtime supporter of the Vermont Workers' Center.

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