America Needs More Good Jobs

Creating family-wage jobs that strengthen communities is an important goal of our negotiations. Longshore jobs today provide one of the few chances working families have to buy a modest home, send their children to college, and save for retirement – something very few blue collar jobs provide now.

Jobs are disappearing

A generation or two ago, it wasn’t as hard to find a good-paying job with decent benefits. Today, those jobs are rare. Many positions are part-time and temporary. Others are dead-end, low-wage jobs that provide little or no benefits and require employees to spend a big part of their monthly paycheck just to qualify for modest health or retirement benefits.

Costs are rising

While good jobs are getting harder to find, there’s also less support for working families from the government. Right-wing politicians are cutting funds for public schools – forcing parents to consider expensive private alternatives. Cuts to public colleges and universities mean that tuition is no longer free and now costs thousands of dollars. Good childcare programs are expensive and hard to find. Public spending for job training programs and apprenticeships is down, while spending for military and defense contractors is way up. And none of this includes the huge increases in gasoline, housing, and health care costs.

The squeeze on working families

Most Americans now work harder, earn less, and feel more insecure than the previous generation. Real wages (when paychecks and living costs are adjusted for inflation) have gone down in the past 30 years, forcing both parents to work, and leaving single parents in an even tighter bind.

Connection to the 2008 longshore contract

Over 25,000 longshore workers along the west coast are covered by a contract that expires on June 30, 2008. Those jobs are critical for the working families involved, and their paychecks provide important support for all the small businesses in local communities that depend on good-paying longshore jobs.

This year, the importance of the longshore contract negotiations could be even greater, because the fight for good jobs extends beyond the docks:

• Longshore workers are “holding the line” against benefit cuts. For decades, Longshore workers have held the line against health care and retirement cuts. While corporations have forced most other workers to accept cuts, longshore workers have held firm. A victory this year against cutbacks could inspire other workers to “hold the line” and rally to protect their own benefits from further cuts.
• Longshore workers want quality health care for everyone. Although longshore workers have some of the best health care benefits in the nation, they want all Americans to have quality care – just like the members of Congress enjoy. That means replacing the wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive private insurance companies with a single-payer system that saves money and improves care – like the Medicare system already provides for older Americans.

Did you know?

The longshore workers pioneered group health insurance, including preventive medical care, vision and dental insurance for workers and their families, with little or no co-payment. The ILWU won the first union dental plan covering children. And they continue to fight for universal health care for all families. (Source)