kelloggs strike over

Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) who work at Kellogg’s ready to eat cereal plants in Battle Creek, Mich., Lancaster, Pa., Omaha, Neb. and Memphis, Tenn. have voted to accept the recommended collective bargaining agreement. Approval of the contract ends the BCTGM’s strike against Kellogg’s, which began on October 5, 2021.

Greenland bans fossil fuel exploration

Greenland has announced it is permanently halting all new oil and gas exploration in the country.

Despite the recent discovery of potentially significant oil reserves off the island’s east coast, the country’s government says the costs for our planet far outweigh any potential financial gains: “The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect, we have much more to gain.”

In addition to banning oil and gas exploration, the country has also introduced legislation to halt the investigation, exploration, and extraction of uranium.

Hopefully, Greenland’s actions will inspire other countries to follow suit and accelerate their divestment from fossil fuels.

OSHA

Work Stoppage 84: year in review

awful health insurance facts

(5.5-6 minute read)

Friends,

First a little background, I was an HR Benefits Director for a company in the US for over five years. We had facilities in three states when I worked there. Within a month of starting as the director I already hated health insurance and recognized that the scam was worse than I imagined. The horrors only increased as I learned more, until the faithful [fateful] year I learned, and we switched to, a “Self-Funded Health Care Plan.”

Before we talk about Self-Funded (SF) Plan let’s cover what is a Fully-Funded (FF) Plan.

Fully-Funded Insurance Plan

A FF plan is exactly what you think is happening at your company. Your company signs up with one of the major insurance carriers, gives them certain details about their employees, and the carriers then give them a list of premium payments for benefit levels.

So the company can pick from a bunch of different plans with different benefit levels and costs to the company. Then the company picks how much of that cost they will have the employees pay. You sign up for the plan level you want with what other family members you want covered, it comes out of your paycheck and you start dealing with the insurance company for all your health needs.

When you go to the doctor’s office, that claim gets send to the insurance company.

Every month the company gets a bill that shows which employees are on the plans at what rate and that’s it. Once you hit a certain number of covered bodies on a plan you can also start getting information about what kinds of things people are going to the doctors for. For instance, you might get a report that shows that 20% of your employees are making claims that might indicate they are pre-diabetic. It doesn’t say which employees and also they don’t give that information until you have a lot of people covered so not to expose it through just percentages.

They suggest you use this information to drive health incentives to your employees. The insurance company might even offer a discount if you offer a health drive event.

From talking to people, this is what everyone thinks is happening at their company, and for FF plans, they are mostly right.

Self-Funded Insurance Plan

Before I get into this, know that these are complicated. I can easily talk about my experience, but not all SF plans are exactly the same. The base concept is the same, which is what I’m here to write about.

In a SF plan, instead of hiring a carrier to handle your insurance claims, the company itself because an insurance company. That means the company is cutting out the insurance company to save on some money. The company will then buy other insurance in case the claims balloon to quickly, but the point of SF is that the company takes on more of the risk of the health insurance. This saves the company money which they pass on to the employees the shareholders.

The company still makes the same looking benefits plans that you see in FF, they also sign on with the same hospital systems and networks. So you might have Medical Mutual FF or Medical Mutual SF, and can see the same network either way.

So, it sounds like everything above is the same, except that detail of the company being the insurance company, where is the horror? I’m going to quote from the wiki article above in the “Prevalence” section:

Perhaps the biggest advantage of self-funded plans is transparency of claims data. Self-funded employers who contract a TPA receive a monthly report detailing medical claims and pharmacy costs. Knowing this information becomes instrumental in controlling costs by shifting buying patterns. Other advantages include plan flexibility, access to national PPO networks, and financial savings.

Let me tell you in simple terms what that means. It meant that every week in my plan, I got an excel sheet emailed to me that showed me:

Employee Name

Date of Claim

Family Member who claim was for

Where the claim was filed

What service or prescription it was for

How much it cost

I want you to think about that. For every SF plan, someone connected to the company is getting information about your claims. What medicine you are getting. What services you are getting. The SF administrator at your company knows you or your spouse are pregnant before you probably told your family.

Now, you must be thinking, well, yes, but in a FF plan the insurance company knows that also. That is true, but the insurance company isn’t sitting two cubicles over from HR and hearing that you had another disciplinary action. The insurance company probably isn’t thinking, well, look, they are in that grey area if we should let them go and I just saw that their kid is starting treatment for leukemia which is going to increase our premiums by 10%.

Are you seeing the horror yet? I will just throw out that there are laws to protect you from this, HIPAA & ADA are two big ones, but you know how that goes.

On a personal note: I hated knowing what I saw and recused myself from disciplinary discussions because of this.

Some companies will tell you they have a third party administrator (TPA) to review and see all this data so there is no chance of this happening, but, if you read the articles about SF it still comes down the company has liability to manage the claims which means someone can know it all, if they want.

Another small horror to mention is that the company controls the benefit to all levels. So they could see employees buying X amount of Y medication even though there is a generic available. They can then change the plan to make the medication not be insured and push everyone to the generic. That is what it means above when it says “… shifting buying patterns.”

Is my company using Self-Funded?

Does your company have over 500 employees? If so, then probably. It used to be only companies over 1,000 could do it, but now that number is shrinking every year.
What can I do about this?

Keep voting for those looking to reform the US Health Insurance landscape. Not much you can do about it at your own company.

For-profits tryna privatize libraries

Truthout article by Caleb Nichols

Excerpt: (7m read)

“This library is full of losers,” an HR person said to me as I signed my letter of resignation from my public library job. “A bunch of losers who just take, take, take. Good for you for moving up in the world.” I was truly shocked by her disdain for my coworkers.

The HR person approved of my resignation because I was leaving an assistant position to take a professional one at another library, joining the ranks of other degreed librarians after graduating from library school. But her comment dripped with scorn toward all the people who simply showed up to work each day, collecting their modest paychecks and serving the public. Indeed, her comment reflected a more widespread attitude that I’ve found among administrators (members of the professional managerial class) within the public sector: Many are capitalist groupies who see unionized employees working for the government as leeches. This anti-worker sentiment within the administrative ranks of many public libraries has made it easier for one of the most nefarious grifts in the U.S. economic system to take hold: the public-private partnership, a Reagan-era arrangement in which private industry “partners” with the public sector, claiming to be able to deliver more for less in service to the public.

…

Library Systems and Services (LS&S) is a for-profit, private company that has been quietly infiltrating public libraries since 1997 when it successfully negotiated a contract to privatize the county library system in Riverside County, California. In the ‘90s and through the first decade of the 2000s, LS&S operated using a business model that will be familiar to anyone who follows local government issues in the U.S.: a private company descends on a municipal or county government that is in financially poor shape, and offers to take over (or “outsource”) management of a public service, like a library, for a fraction of the cost. This business model changed slightly, and alarmingly, about a decade ago.

In 2010, LS&S made headlines by securing contracts to privatize public libraries in affluent, economically healthy municipalities, rather than in struggling, economically marginalized communities. Flexing into a new type of market, the sky is apparently the limit for LS&S, which according to its own website has shockingly morphed into “the 3rd largest library system in the United States.”

If this is true, LS&S is a major threat to one of our most beloved, democratic and socialistic institutions. Operating unchecked, LS&S stands to make enormous profits by destroying decent-paying, unionized jobs, de-professionalizing an already struggling profession, and reducing library services to anti-human, vertically integrated content silos that do not reflect the values of local communities, all while remaining completely unaccountable to taxpayers.

How does LS&S manage to cut costs while operating services? On the backs of workers. When companies like LS&S privatize public goods, old contracts — and unions — are thrown out. Workers, even PMC workers like degreed librarians, cease earning annual salaries, solid benefits and government-backed pensions, and are instead given comparably lower hourly wages, private retirement accounts, and have no collective bargaining power or ability to file grievances. LS&S claims to be a public good — by saving communities taxpayer money — but it is actually destroying good-paying, union-backed jobs and paving the way for more private takeovers of public goods.

And for some people associated with the company, this almost appears to be a vendetta against working people. Consider the comments of LS&S founder and former CEO Frank Pezzanite. As reported in The New York Times, Pezzanite said that “a lot of libraries are atrocious … their policies are all about job security. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement.” Sounds an awful lot like most CEOs, hedge fund billionaires and other capitalists who make trillions in profits off of the labor of workers!

Additionally, as a private company, LS&S is able to circumvent transparency laws that taxpayer-funded governments are required to follow. In a nutshell: taxpayers fund LS&S-managed libraries, but have no ability to find out how LS&S operates. Freedom of Information Act? Nope — doesn’t apply to private companies. Public accountability? An interesting question. Normally, if a company does something you don’t like, you can boycott it. But if people boycotted a public library? Well then, I suppose local governments would have good, measurable data to use to justify further slashing budgets. LS&S is completely unaccountable, and we have no way of knowing how they conduct themselves internally, even as they manage a taxpayer-funded service.

And there is cause for concern in the way LS&S conducts itself, beyond just the alarming idea that one of the most beloved public institutions in American life is under serious threat of quiet privatization.

An activist engaged in public library advocacy told me that a dozen of the vendors that public libraries use to purchase books in bulk are actually owned by LS&S, so “many libraries are paying LS&S already and don’t know it.” I haven’t been able to independently confirm this claim, but it is something that investigative journalists should look into. If it’s true, his is even more sinister than it appears on its surface: this sort of vertical integration could set an extremely dangerous precedent that further erodes the public’s ability to control the information it consumes, not to mention which types of information resources are purchased by its tax dollars.

Furthermore, it’s worth taking note of who actually owns LS&S: Boston-based private equity firm Islington Capital Partners, whose co-founder, Paul Spinale, worked for Bain Capital during Mitt Romney’s tenure at the infamous firm. So just let that sink in: The same arch-villains known for siphoning taxpayer-funded government bailout money into their own pockets now have majority control over a private company that manages 80 public library systems in the U.S. and which loudly and proudly claims to be the “3rd largest library system in the US.” Even LS&S’s current CEO is a veteran grifter who previously worked for the Scantron Corporation, a company whose business model is arguably responsible for the anti-human practice of standardized testing across the education spectrum.

LS&S’s methods are not unique, but that doesn’t make them any less atrocious. It claims to take failing or shoddy public institutions and miraculously turn them around through its superior understanding of how things should be run — the same-old, same-old of private interests trying to edge out public goods. Think of Louis DeJoy and his seemingly intentional mismanagement of the U.S. Postal Service. While LS&S hasn’t been quite as disastrous for the public libraries, it represents a similar threat to the public interest: corporate takeover of public spaces. If LS&S can demonstrate that it is able to work enough corporate magic on enough libraries, then conservatives and libertarians (not to mention corporate Democrats) could be armed with over 20 years of corporate-engineered data to justify further privatization of public spaces.

What’s clear is that LS&S is not performing any actual miracles. It is destroying unionized jobs, denigrating and demoralizing workers, and contributing to the myth that unionized public sector workers are lazy, inefficient and unworthy of the benefits that they receive.

Ending clip

Excerpt from Chapter 4 of The Dawn of Everything.