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Workers Need to Cut a Deal and Get Back to Work & #711; Now

Workers Need to Cut a Deal and Get Back to Work , Now

OPINION

By MARK LACTER

The Cliff Notes version of the walkouts by grocery workers and L.A.’s Metropolitan Transit Authority mechanics focuses on the battle over health care coverage. But as with any abbreviated account, there’s a lot more to it, most notably the fact that surprise, surprise the system simply doesn’t work.

Take the grocery strike, for example. The Southern California supermarket impasse is a murky proposition.

For years, the major chains operated under a model of low wages/good benefits that suited them just fine because health coverage used to be a throwaway perk that they figured would instill a little loyalty among the troops.

Somehow, the grocery workers have managed to hold onto their free health care (these days it sounds almost quaint), but at last it’s time to cough up a few dollars. Except when you’re accustomed to getting something for nothing, and when your weekly paycheck is not that big to begin with, a few dollars can seem like a big deal.

There’s a bigger imperative at play: the union itself. Take away those attractive benefits and suddenly there’s no particular incentive to being organized, especially if non-union shops begin offering their own coverage.

We’re still a ways off from that day of reckoning , whenever they settle, the grocery workers will still be getting better coverage than the Wal-Marts of the world could even begin to match , but the sad truth is these workers have precious little bargaining power. Unlike air traffic controllers or even auto assemblers, these are not highly skilled positions. If you’re a checkout clerk or bagger soon to be missing that first paycheck and the rent is due in a couple of weeks, the pressure to cut some sort of deal is bound to keep building.

They should cut a deal. But that’s not the real answer. Once again, we’ve been reminded that the workplace is not equipped to be society’s arbiter on who gets decent medical care and who doesn’t. The current system is mangled and inequitable. The only solution, imperfect as it might be, is a nationalized program separate and apart from employers, whose ultimate and appropriate mission is to make money and infuse it back into the economy.

Too many uninsured, too little drug coverage for seniors, too few choices among providers, and a population that is getting grayer by the moment , this is the story behind those picket lines, a story that no mediator can ever hope to resolve.

Lacter is editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal.

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