Mandatory Proletarianization and American-Style Health Insurance:

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Paul Street, a zmag blogger writes here about the way that employer-based health insurance makes quasi-slaves out of us:



ENHANCING EMPLOYER POWER: It’s one thing to know that you might lose your wage or salary if you dare to stand up to your domineering, overpaid, low-life idiot of a boss. It’s another thing to know that you might also sacrifice your own and your family’s access to health insurance. It deflates your willingness to openly question your employer's authority when doing so means you might soon be unable to financially survive a trip to the hospital or the discovery of a disease. Prostitutes don’t generally stand up aggressively to the pimps who protect them. Employment based-health care coverage may have been a cherished post-WWII trade-union victory (pioneered by the United Auto Workers), but it feeds worker powerlessness on the job, particularly when it is "granted" – as it usually in contemporary America – to workers who lack union protection.

MANDATORY LABOR POWER PROSTITUTION: It’s also a driving force behind people’s “willingness” to prostitute/proletarianize themselves in the first place. Who really wants to spend the lion’s share of every waking week day renting their vital human labor power and transferring critical surplus value to the parasitic, blood-sucking bastards who happen (by sheer luck and/or dedicated spite) to sit atop the naked human pyramid called the "modern" American workplace?

EMPLOYMENT-BASED HEALTH CARE AND OVERWORK: Last but not least, we have the richly perverse relationship that exists between employment-based health insurance and overwork in the “land of freedom.” Many on the left know that Americans now suffer from the longest working hours in the industrialized world. Few of us make the critical connection between that draining affliction – which also has under-appreciated dark consequences for the state of America's fading “democracy” (well understood by 19th century U.S. trade union pioneers…see my “Labor Day Reflections: Time as a Democracy Issue,” ZNet Daily Commentaries, September 3, 2002, at www.zmag. org/ sustainers/content/ 2002-08/01street.cfm) – and the health insurance system.

The essence of this toxic connection, related quite well by Juliet Schor in her marvelous book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1991) is simple. Health care costs, Schor notes, make up a huge part (40 percent) of total employee compensation in the U.S. And since employers pay these large (and ever-rising) costs per worker and not per hour worked, the employment-based health insurance system creates an enormous structural incentive for bosses to extort as much work (and as many hours) from as few full-time, benefit-eligible workers as possible. The bosses fill remaining gaps with part-time employees, who are of course not eligible for health coverage. Hence the curious simultaneous presence of hideously overworked Americans and large numbers of unemployed and under-employed Americans...The more hours employers can extract from the hides and souls of their full-time workers, of course, the larger is Marx’s “reserve army of labor,” made up of the unemployed and the part-time employed....The larger that army, the greater is the ability of the aforementioned "parasitic, blood-sucking bastards" (I’ve toiled for a few) to exploit the “lucky” active (full-time) army of labor with shameless impunity. That exploitation includes the shifting of an ever-increasing share of skyrocketing health care costs on to the "grateful" proletarians – most of us ordinary Americans. Just ask the grocery workers of Southern California, who also struck this spring – over employer health care rollbacks. It’s a classic social, economic, and political vicious circle, held together at the end of the day by the basic ultimate independent variable of state-sponsored capitalist privilege.

http://blog.zmag.org/empire/archives/000455.html#more

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