{"id":12,"date":"2008-03-13T09:21:49","date_gmt":"2008-03-13T17:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/nor-any-drop-to-drink\/"},"modified":"2009-05-05T15:32:22","modified_gmt":"2009-05-05T23:32:22","slug":"nor-any-drop-to-drink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/nor-any-drop-to-drink\/","title":{"rendered":"Nor any drop to drink"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday evening, the Committee on Political Education<\/a> of the South Bay Labor Council met at SCVWD headquarters to interview Directors Santos and Kwok and me. They will announce COPE’s endorsements in a few weeks. I, personally, would have benefited from more time for intensive reading, but there are many important local races to look at for June’s election, so their schedule has to be pretty full.<\/p>\n

There were about 20 people there, both from the Labor Council and from the District itself. Everyone was very friendly. The candidates answered five questions: why we were running, our past commitment to labor, our strategies for addressing budget constraints that could lead to layoffs, our strategies for dealing with unfunded benefits liabilities<\/a>, and our opinion about Project Labor Agreements.<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking more about my answer to the unfunded liabilities question. Last night I said that this was not a problem limited to the SCVWD, that public agencies and private sector companies alike share this problem, and that such a global problem needs a global solution. Upon retiring after 10 years at the District, an employee receives complete health coverage for life; after 15 years of service, one dependent is fully covered as well. If you’re working in the high-tech industry, in retail or in a service industry, this may seem like an unimaginably generous benefit. But if you were promised such a benefit, and faithfully upheld your end of the bargain in the expectation of receiving it, imagine how betrayed you’d feel if anyone talked about taking it away later. I believe that some form of universal health coverage is the only fair resolution to this crisis. Individual organizations are not going to be able to solve it with individual actions.<\/p>\n

And yet, the reason it is a crisis is that it can’t go on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\nYesterday evening, the Committee on Political Education of the South Bay Labor Council met at SCVWD headquarters to interview Directors…\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “Nor any drop to drink”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}