Labor criticizes President Obama’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year for keeping the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health insurance plans.

The Cadillac tax is a 40-percent levy on health plans provided by employers to workers if the value is more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families. It’s scheduled to take effect in 2020.

The budget “makes clear the Affordable Care Act’s so-called ‘Cadillac Tax’ is bad tax policy,” said United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard. “The small changes the president proposes will not fix a tax designed to make working families pay more for their health care. USW members already see the effects of this tax at the bargaining table, where employers propose to increase deductibles and co-pays. Our union has strongly supported the bipartisan efforts in Congress to repeal the tax. Full repeal is the only solution.”

The objection is momentarily moot since the GOP-run Congress refuses to hold hearings on the proposal.

Workers and public sector unions face a crisis if comments during “Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association” arguments in January revealed an anti-union ruling.

The case, backed by the anti-union National Right to Work Committee, is whether laws that let unions representing public workers collect “agency fees” to pay just for contract negotiations and enforcement violate workers’ free speech rights. But the real issue is whether public-worker unions can survive a big loss of revenue as “free riders” refuse to share in the costs of wages, benefits, etc.

Justice Elena Kagan said thousands of union contracts and 10 million workers could be affected, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked, “If you’re receiving the benefit of something, why is it hurting your First Amendment right to speak?”

An AFL-CIO report on its “Raise The Wage” campaign praised grassroots successes by local unions and unorganized workers who achieved raises at FiatChrysler Auto Workers, Temple University’s adjunct professors, National Nurses United’s new locals, and Communications’ Workers’ gains of 5,000 airline passenger service agents, plus at low-wage, non-union firms such as Walmart.

“We recognized we can create a healthier economy and a more democratic society,” the AFL-CIO said. “But everyone has to participate to create an economy that works for all of us.”

Union membership nationwide rose by 219,000 in 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, noting that unions had 14.795 million members last year, or 11.1 percent of the U.S. workforce. Union members in Illinois were up 16,000, to 847,000.

Unions and customers back USPS reform, said Letter Carriers President Fredric Rolando. Senators from both parties appeared to sign on to a planned postal reform bill to end USPS’ deficits and put it on a sound footing. However, the more conservative House GOP favors cutting delivery, firing thousands of workers, gutting union contracts and privatizing and outsourcing USPS business from middle-class unionized postal workers to minimum-wage non-union Staples stores.

Teachers upset with Detroit schools staged mass sick-outs last month, shutting down dozens of schools over conditions within the buildings such as lack of heat and rodent infestation. Detroit Federation of Teachers president Ivy Bailey said, “The level of frustration has come to a head. City and state officials continue to scapegoat and blame educators rather than helping us help kids.”

Teamsters are fighting pension cuts threatened by the Central States Pension Fund, made possible by 2014’s Multi-Employer Pension Reform Act (MPRA). But this isn’t just the 273,000 Teamster retirees since 200 multi-employer pension funds cover 1.5 million American workers. Teamsters’ Committees to Protect Pensions say the fund’s condition stems from its trustees, Wall Street fund managers, and lax government oversight, and Teamsters president James Hoffa supports legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders to undo the MPRA.

‘You’re either with us or you’re against us,’ AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka warned lawmakers about the so-called free trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Formally signed in Singapore last month, it could be considered by Congress in April.

The air conditioning manufacturer Carrier is shipping 1,400 jobs from its Indianapolis plant to Mexico in what it described as “strictly a business decision.” But the AFL-CIO blames “major flaws” in trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The AFL-CIO’s Kenneth Quinnell writes that Carrier, a subsidiary of United Technologies, is benefiting from trade pacts that put companies in competition with foreign companies that pay low wages and exploit workers; fail to level the playing field by lowering taxes; eliminate tariffs designed to prevent an increase in imports; and provide companies with extraordinary powers they don’t have in the U.S.

They’ll have foreign “rights that shift the balance of power further away from working people,” Quinnell said.

News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper