Dana Corp Is Latest To Dump It’s Retiree Health Benefits Responsibility

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/6323

Dana Corp Is Latest To Dump It’s Retiree Health Benefits Responsibility - 07/09/07

Lede: Dana Corp Is Latest To Dump It’s Retiree Health Benefits Responsibility. Doug Cunningham has more on the story.

By Doug Cunningham

Manufacturers in the U.S are trying more frequently now to offload their union retiree health insurance responsibilities to unions. This trend may go full bore in the Big Three domestic auto contract talks this summer. The latest auto-related company to do this is Dana Corporation, which just settled with the United Auto Workers and United Steel Workers. Dana is paying over $700 million plus $80 million in stock to VEBAs, or Voluntary Employer Benefits Associations to take over retire health benefits. GM agreed to pay the UAW $450 million for a VEBA at Delphi – another bankrupt auto parts maker. A similar deal was reached at Goodyear. A similar deal is reportedly on the table at the auto contract talks between the UAW and the Big Three domestic automakers. It looks like a corporate strategy to break the social contract established by union-won pension and health insurance benefits over decades of struggle by shifting the responsibility for paying for those benefits to individual workers and to their unions.

[Vincardog]

1. IS it time to support Universal single payer Health CARE?

[ikojo]

2. This is what happens when fewer than 10% of private

sector workers are unionized. The big corporations know that union members, comfortable with THEIR benefits, aren't about to get in the streets for RETIREES! They also know that what they do to unions has already been done to non union workers. Because we don't have any labor education in the US (either in the unions or in high school) people do not realize that even if they are not in a union, they benefit from a STRONG and LARGE union movement.

Notice that as the power of unions decreases, benefits and conditions for all workers also decrease.

If we had a unionized workforce approaching that of the levels found in the 1950s, we wouldn't have a health care or retiree benefit crisis.

The union movement did this to themselves though. Pink collar office workers were not aggressively unionized and neither were industries with a predominantly minority and low paid workforce. Two natural allies were ignored by big union in favor of the manufacturing sector.

[rubberducky]

3. Sorry, but as a former union worker, most people I knew

would have definitly gone to the streets for the retirees. Mostly because we knew that someday we would be in thier shoes.