Many, especially, the big wall to wall public employee and service employee unions would like to get basic or major medical health insurance on the government’s dime, but many other don’t want that. Active employee health and welfare has been a cash cow for unions. The H&W program is run by what are called Taft-Hartley Trusts which are facially a joint employer-union run trust, but which the unions commonly dominate. The trusts normally are VERY wealthy. They own companies and buildings, make loans, and muscle both banks and businesses with the money. They also have lots of meetings in warm, swank places at the trust’s expense. Oh, and all that trust money doesn’t have all those troublesome Constitutional limitations that dues money has, so you can buy politicians with it to your heart’s content. Other than those such as UAW which because of workforce contraction have huge retiree H&W liabilities and few employees to pay for it, unions with Taft-Hartley trusts aren’t going to want to give them up.

To the unions that don’t have them: few public employee unions have trusts and the Taft-Hartley Amendment doesn’t apply to public sector employees and employers. For those public employee unions that do have trusts, they’ll want to keep them for the reasons discussed above. For the rest and for unions representing employees in low-wage service occupations, they’ll want the basic H&W to go to the government but they’ll want to put all the money on the paycheck or for enhanced supplemental health care benefits.

The controlling dynamic in contract negotiations for the last two decades has been rising health and welfare costs have really impacted wages. Neither the union nor the employer, though to a lesser degree, can do much to cut back health and welfare benefits; the employees simply will NOT stand for it plus you come under tremendous pressure from the providers as well. Money that goes to H&W isn’t available to go to wages or other benefits. Unions would really like to change that fact.

In most of the states with heavily unionized public employees, management will immediately go along with this. After all, the unions OWN Democrat public “management.” The “management” will even applaud themselves by crowing about all the money they saved and how they now have stable and predictable H&W costs. Then they’ll give most if not all of the “savings” to the union in wages and enhanced benefits like health club memberships, wellness programs, supplemental insurance to cover deductibles and co-pays, etc.

And none of that is speculation; it is exactly what has happened here when some of the State’s unionized employees were allowed to go out into their own trusts. Of course, they were allowed the trusts under Democrats because the Ds know that some of that nice unrestricted H&W money is going into Democrat coffers plus the trusts just love to bring on Democrat politicians and lawyers as “consultants” and fly them to Palm Springs or Honolulu for meetings. Unfortunately for Alaska’s unions for most of the time that they’ve had those trusts, they’ve had a Republican Legislature and/or a Republican Governor, so the State has been unwilling to give the union trusts more than it gives employees who aren’t in a union run plan. Consequently, the employees in the trusts pay a lot more out of pocker because the trust’s board can’t withstand the member pressure for enhanced benefits – like health club memberships and such. That won’t be the case in Democrat run states; they’ll just give the unions more money.

But, not to worry, once they get card check, we’ll all have those union “cadillac plans” as supplements to our government insurance. Right up to the day we get laid off because the company is folding.