The fight for Wisconsin's workers has given American labor a wonderful opportunity to remind the country what it owes to unionized American labor, the weekend, the 40 hour week, and paid vacation are just some of the things most Americans enjoy due to the hard work of unions in America. But there is one element of labor's legacy that is often left out and I would like to highlight because it literally saved the lives of my mother and me and allowed my late brother to age into adulthood: employer-provided group health insurance plans.
I suspect the silence on this is due, in part, to the talking point about public workers and their "Cadillac health insurance plans" and the fact that most workers in this country don't have those plans because most workers are not unionized today. That set of circumstances creates a natural division that might be wise to avoid. Let me tell you about how people who have those plans and need them actually live.
My mother and father were both United States Postal Service Employees and members of the American Postal Workers Union. That union and the greater labor organization of which it was a part fought for and won a group plan for its members, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Federal Employee Plan, i.e. the health insurance coverage that every public worker--from the President to your mail carrier--receives for his or her hard work.
My mother happened to be a lifelong cancer survivor and sufferer of advanced rheumatoid arthritis. She couldn't lift the milk carton to fill our cereal bowls for breakfast. Most days, she would be in so much pain that she would be doubled up on my parents’ bed vomiting. However, I was born with cancerous genetic disorder and my little brother was born with a combined auto-immune deficiency disorder, which both required constant care by world renown specialists and trips to San Francisco to see them. So, she and my father went to work every single day of our childhood, to a job that required hard physical labor, to ensure we had the coverage our care required and a roof over our heads.
That coverage provided our family with the means to get me the care of one of the best pediatric neurosurgeons in the world and access to primitive forms of chemotherapy in the mid-1980s when I developed a brain tumor. It paid for my mother's steroids, painkillers, and cancer treatments. It also paid for bi-weekly hospitalizations and IV infusions that kept my dear, kind, and sweet brother alive for 18 years. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal with few downsides doesn't it? Maybe, if we sacrificed a little bit more, we wouldn't have needed that kind of plan. Let me tell you how we lived.
Constant five hour car trips and the cost of gas, lodging, and food--on top of the normal costs of running a family of five--didn't leave us with much money. Even though my mother's grandparents let us live in my mother's childhood home, our family's net annual income for the first ten years of my life was $8,000 a year, which doesn't leave much money for keeping up a home. We had holes in the roof and hard winters. There were pans and pots on the living room floor to collect rain. The floorboards started to crack in the bathroom from water damage. We had cockroach infestations due to that and eventually rats in the walls. We couldn't afford winterized windows, so we insulated our windows with garbage bags and slept with our heads away from the windows in winter. Now, let me tell you what those "greedy union goons" did when they found out about this state of affairs.
Our mother was widely respected in Redding's General Mail Facility as one of the hardest and smartest workers on the floor. But it took a while for people to get to know here due to the fact that she was always either on the floor or in the hospital with us or as a patient. Eventually, in the mid-1990s, they found out what our home life was like. Her friends at our APWU local started to give her small gifts of money, which she used to help finance a move into a rented home with a landlord that was in good condition.
While my mother was always charitable--she always made sure we were dressed warmly in winter and started a coat drive for kids who didn't have sweaters and jackets--but had a very hard time accepting charity. She would routinely turn down offers of money from my maternal grandparents due to that. So, I asked her why she didn't have a hard time in that instance. Her answer: "We're down now, but we'll have the opportunity to stand up for them someday."
That is what the labor movement is about. It's about decent, hardworking people standing by each other in good times and bad and helping each other out. When I read or hear regular people talk about unions being 'un-American' or 'un-Christian' I have a hard time understanding that. What is more American than thinking a person who puts in an honest day's work should not live in squalor or go hungry or without a doctor? What is more Christian than lending a helping hand to a neighbor?
Today, I am a Democratic organizer and my mother and father are retired members of the APWU. We have a very simple message for the workers in Wisconsin. "We are one."