Return of the scrooges
On Tuesday, the school board voted voted 5 to 2
to extend health benefits to more than 2,300 part-time cafeteria workers at an estimated annual cost of $35.5 million.
The move came over warnings from staff and Supt. David L. Brewer that no money was budgeted to pay for the benefits.
It also came over the objection of both the Editorial Board ("The district's budget is already in trouble, and neither the board nor administrators know where to find this money") and op-edder/LAUSD parent L.J. Williamson, who made a similar argument:
Part-time food service employees are seeking the same health benefits -- including coverage for their families -- that their full-time counterparts enjoy. Extending these benefits to cafeteria staff who currently work only three hours a day would cost an estimated $40 million a year, according to school board calculations. [...]
This is fat that the food service's too-lean budget simply doesn't have. If health benefits were extended to these part-time workers, the CFPA estimates it would mean that the per-plate meal budget would be reduced from 85 cents to 49 cents. Making healthy food available for that amount would take a miracle of biblical proportions. So we'd be improving the healthcare of nearly 2,000 part-time workers at the expense of the 500,000 children who eat in public school cafeterias every day.
But lefty bloggers, beginning with an uncharacteristically ranty Kevin Drum, smelled a heartless rat:
I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It's not that Williamson doesn't have a point, it's just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don't get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn't everyone else's? I don't pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes.
It's true that the growing gap between public workers and private workers is a real problem. In the past, there was something of a tradeoff: public sector workers generally got paid less than private sector workers but made up for it with job security and benefits. Today, though, public workers generally get higher salaries and better benefits and more vacation and earlier retirement and more lucrative pension packages compared to comparable private sector workers. And private sector workers are understandably annoyed by this. But their annoyance would be better directed not at the lucky public sector workers, but at the mahogany row executives and conservative politicians who pretend that the only possible use for the mountains of cash generated by decades of economic growth is to give it all to mahogany row executives and the billionaires who contribute to conservative politicians.
More where that came from, and a bit of a response, after the jump.
Frequent L.A. Times Opinion contributor Ezra Klein gave an amen:
Since we don't have universal health care, every single time a group of individuals seeks health coverage, they're forced into direct warfare with their immediate colleagues, place of employment, etc. So in this case, cafeteria workers who need coverage are set in opposition to children who need food. It's a very, very effective method for slowing the expansion of benefits. Every lost battle makes it harder for the next group to win their fight, because it creates yet another set of cafeteria workers or Wal-Mart employees who aren't getting healthcare, and who are thus competing without those labor costs.
Melissa McEwan saw even more unmutual savagery:
[W]e see workers turning their ire on one another, with the despicable underlying attitude that "everyone else only deserve as much as I've got and no more." We see workers who would rather see other people denied a benefit they don't have than see as many benefits extended to as many people as possible.
And, worse yet, we constantly hear Social Darwinists with great benefits pontificating about how workers in crap jobs with crap benefits are only getting what they deserve—and if they want better, they should work harder. Because it's just oh-so-easy to say that people deserve what they get once "I got mine." And once "I got mine," then it becomes all about protecting "me and mine"—and oh what an extraordinary capacity the Social Darwinists have for suffering all manner of indignity being imposed upon others to preserve themselves.
The Mahablog educates us on the "bigger picture":
Here we are, the Richest Nation in the World, and children in a major city are being fed a breakfast and lunch for $2.85 a day (what do those children eat, I wonder? Stuff rejected by the dog food factory?), and the cafeteria workers don't have health benefits. And all this motherbleeper concludes is that the cafeteria workers have some nerve.
Call me the mother of all motherbleepers, but I think what we have here is a failure to communicate. Or better put, people furious about X are taking it out on Y. As I see it, there are two related, but separate, issues:
1) Should there be some kind of universal health care system? For the sake of argument (and, I think, accuracy), let's stipulate that Williamson, her critics, and I all believe that there should be. This brings us to ...2) In the meantime, before that happens (if it ever does), should the spouses and children of part-time cafeteria workers at one of the most cash-strapped major school districts in the country be offered health care at an annual cost to L.A. taxpayers of at least $35 million?
1) does not = 2). If believing that there should be universal health care means that in the meantime one should approve the families of 15-hour-a-week public workers being covered by their employer, where does that logic end? Is 10 hours a week enough to qualify? Five? (Keep in mind that there are, according to Williamson, plenty of full-time cafeteria jobs available, and they provide full coverage.)
I, too, would love a world in which we weren't even talking about the trade-off between children's nourishment and working-class health care needs, and where insurance and employment were divorced altogether. We don't, alas, live in that world, so choices have to be made, unless one just considers L.A. taxpayers as ATMs for the public sector.
The mother of all motherbleepers pretty fairly summed up my position. I'd just like to add that my intent with this piece was to stay focused on the smaller picture. Of course this issue brings to mind the vast problems with healthcare in our country, but that's not what I really came here to talk about. I take issue with the posters who accuse me of setting up a false dichotomy of kids vs. workers, because in fact, we are talking about the same pot of money: the Food Services Budget. We can talk about the human issue of universal health care and I'll probably wind up agreeing with you on the big philosophical points, but my piece wasn't really about big philosophical points; it was about the finite pile of money assigned to one specific department of the school system. Think small and you'll get me.
Posted by: L.J. Williamson | September 04, 2007 at 08:25 AM
Gee guys, I wonder how many of those employees were born in this country. And how many kids getting 'free' lunches are either immigrants or children of immigrants.
You see, a guy wiping windows at the fully automated carwash or doing a 'mow and blow' is unlikely to make enough to be taxed enough to support his own impact on the state's infrastructure, his is unlikely to be able to afford the rent in an expensive city and have anything left over to provide for his kids. The 30 year old working the fries at McD's certainly doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for his three kids' education and 1/2 their daily calories which are provided by the state-.
The issue is not rent-seeking, it is: the socialization of the costs of labor, approaching the Marxian-Malthusian costs, i.e. mere survival. In a real way the native-born middle class (what's left of it) is paying for the Westside nannies and Beverley Hill's gardeners.
But no doubt all those libertarian-leaning Latino immigrants will soon vote low-tax, low-government politicians into office, though. We all know how strong the libertarian tradition is in Mexico, Right?
Posted by: Mitchell Young | September 03, 2007 at 09:41 AM
Since we don't have universal health care, every single time a group of individuals seeks health coverage, they're forced into direct warfare with their immediate colleagues, place of employment, etc.
I don't want to vanish up my own free-market wazoo here, but it's telling that there are so many comments like this one but no consideration that it's the nature of a zero-sum, rent-seeking economy to cause one interest group to be pitted against another for a finite resource.
I'm not going to make any grand libertoid claims for that observation. Education may in fact be inevitably a zero-sum game, and as of 2007 on planet Earth it's fair to say nobody has ever figured out how to make semi-adequate education a business that's scalable over an entire society. In fact I suspect the current system — in which semi-adequate education scales at a loss over the entire society and must always be supported with funds taken by force from the general population — is the best we'll ever get. But it's disingenuous for these folks to claim the problem they're discussing is not the result of the system of public funding that they themselves support. Or actually, it's even more sad: They're not being disingenuous, they're just being ingenuous (?) because they don't even understand this basic truth of human life.
Posted by: Tim Cavanaugh | August 31, 2007 at 01:41 AM