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MTA Fails to Lead on Single-Payer Healthcare

I've been coming to the MTA annual meeting for 5 or 6 years now. It's a fascinating experience, in part because of the unique qualities of the members. Mostly teachers, but with an admixture of Educational Support Professionals and higher ed faculty, the audience is in varying measures homogeneous and heterogeneous. Nowhere was that more in evidence than during the discussion around single-payer healthcare yesterday.

Tim Collins, the leader of the Springfield Teachers Association, had proposed a New Business Item that would direct the union to organize a signature drive for a ballot measure for single-payer health care. The union has been publicly supporting single-payer for years, has been contributing $10,000/year to MassCare a single-payer lobbying organization, and is currently supporting a bill in the legislature that would provide a medicare-like system for all Massachusetts residents.

One other important piece of context: In the past two elections, the MTA (with help from the NEA) has spent huge amounts of money fighting off atrocious ballot initiatives from well-funded small government advocates. The first initiative would have eliminated state income taxes. The most recent would have reduced sales-taxes to 3%. If either of these had passed, it would have created huge problems for funding public education. And that's not just idle speculation: when the misguided "Prop 2 1/2" passed a generation ago, it threw a whole cohort of young teachers out of the profession, which is still visible in the demographics of teachers today.

Collins believes that we should take the offensive and bring our own ballot measure to the election and stop merely being reactive. It's well-known that growth in healthcare costs are one of the factors that is putting pressure on the economy, in both the public and private sectors and many of us believe that without a single-payer system, there's no way to get enough leverage to wring the profits out and keep costs down. And, as I say, MTA is already on record supporting this bill and is currently putting in place a new structure for political organizing.

But the MTA leadership was clearly against the motion. In spite of the wording of the motion, which made it quite clear that it was only about organizing the members to collect signatures, the leadership claimed that the motion would cost $10,000,000 and increase dues by more than $100. This seemed like a transparent attempt to simply torpedo the motion to me.

There was passionate debate on the floor. We had built a well-organized group to speak for the motion. Advocates spoke for the need to take the initiative and organize. Detractors worried that it wasn't the "right time". In point of fact, no-one said it wasn't a good idea. When there was a statement made about how difficult it would be to collect the signatures, I decided to frame a question...

"How many members does the MTA have?"

"Around 107,000."

"So, if just 2/3 of the MTA membership signed the petition, that would be enough by itself to put the measure on the ballot?"

"Um... Yes. Mathematically, that's true."

There was a smattering of laughter and applause.

In the end, the motion was defeated. Although it looked very close to me, the chair ruled (rather abruptly) that it wasn't close enough for a teller count. I believe this represents a real failure of leadership -- many of us thought it looked very close, or like we might even have won. Unfortunately, we'll never know.

I believe the MTA leadership is too timid -- rather than organizing and communicating our message to the politicians, too often they seem to be about communicating to us why the politicians can't do what needs to be done to fix fundamental problems. Under tremendous pressure from us, they are making small steps in the right direction, but too often their idea about "organizing" is a media campaign where members are supposed to mail in postcards.

I'm hopeful that we can organize to undertake the ballot initiative anyway -- with or without the MTA support. If we can collect the signatures by the next annual meeting, then maybe we can come back and advocate for the multi-million-dollar media campaign to actually push the initiative through. And maybe we can get a step ahead for a change.