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These are busy days for Joe Hansen, president of the 1.3-million-member United Food and Commercial Workers, Washington, since 2004. His three signature issues — passing the Employee Free Choice Act, fixing the U.S. health care system, and reforming the nation’s immigration system — are all in play in the U.S. Congress.
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All three issues, of course, have a profound bearing on the supermarket and food processing workers he represents. Of the three, health care is the biggest, he said. “Every time we’ve bargained with employers over the past 15 years, health care is No. 1 or No. 1A on the agenda.”
The UFCW and other unions generally agree that health care reform needs to include employer mandates, no taxes on benefits and a public insurance option. “I don’t see how we can have reform unless there’s a public plan to compete with the insurance companies,” Hansen said.
Hansen, who started his career as a supermarket meat cutter in Wisconsin, brings some serious bona fides to the health care debate. For example, he was the only union leader who participated in the Citizen’s Health Care Working Group, which made recommendations to Congress and President Bush in 2006; more recently, he worked with Safeway Chief Executive Officer Steve Burd on the issue. Earlier this month, he was part of small group that met with President Obama — whom the UFCW endorsed in the Democratic primaries last year — to discuss health care. “I believe there will be health care reform this year,” he said.
He also believes that Congress will introduce and act on the Employee Free Choice Act before the August recess. “There’s going to be a compromise, it’s just a question of what it will look like,” he said. The one essential ingredient for labor is a provision for binding arbitration for a first contract.
Although immigration reform is not in the headlines currently, action is taking place behind the scenes, said Hansen, who leads a multi-union committee that worked out labor’s position on the issue. “There’s support on the corporate side for meaningful reform, but it probably won’t come up until the fall,” he said.
Meanwhile, back at the bargaining table, the UFCW and retail management are struggling to figure out a way to compensate for losses in pensions that resulted from the stock market debacle last year. “It’s an overriding problem and hard to solve,” he said. “But it’s led to some collaborative thinking on both sides.”
— Michael Garry
