WEAC Members Detail Health Care Cost Crisis at Roundtable
 |
| Green Bay Education Association President Keith Patt addresses
WEAC members during a health care cost crisis roundtable discussion. |
Representatives of the Doyle administration heard details of how the national
health care cost crisis and legislative proposals would harm Wisconsin
teachers and education support professionals at a roundtable discussion
(Thursday, June 19, 2003).
The roundtable was part of WEAC's Great Schools Lobby Day.
Panels of WEAC members told state budget director David Riemer how
the health care cost crisis, combined with the Qualified Economic Offer
law, has damaged their salaries, benefits and collective bargaining
rights.
Green Bay Education Association President Keith Patt said his members,
along with all other WEAC members, "have endured 10 long years
of the Qualified Economic Offer law that has had both a significant
and damaging impact" on teachers.
Patt said the QEO has damaged school districts' abilities to recruit
and retain teachers and education support professionals.
"In most urban school districts, more than 50% of the staff has
left by their fifth year of teaching," he said. "Starting
salaries and annual raises have not kept pace with inflation. Students
who have graduated from college with degrees in education with large
student loans find it difficult to not only live on a teacher's salary,
but nearly impossible to pay back those loans and experience the benefits
of an American middle-class life.
 |
| WEA Trust Executive Director Al Jacobs |
Patt said that throughout the "QEO ordeal, the one saving grace
for education professionals, the one recruitment and retention tool
that the members of the GBEA have been able to hang on to has been the
quality of their health insurance coverage.
"In order to maintain that health insurance coverage, members
of the GBEA, through the collective bargaining process, have sacrificed
wage increases and contract language for a number of rounds of bargaining.
In addition, GBEA members have absorbed some of the costs of that coverage
through increased deductibles and co-pays as well as premium increases.
"To ask my members to give up those health insurance benefits
that they have won through hard-fought concessions during the collective
bargaining process and to receive nothing in return would be an outrage."
The speakers criticized proposals to make school employees pay a larger
share of their insurance costs.
West Bend teacher Marcia Christianson told the group that a proposal
in the state budget approved by the Senate on June 19 "shifts the
balance of power away from the educators."
The state budget would allow school districts and municipalities to
unilaterally change health insurance carriers for members - without
seeking their agreement. It allows districts to put employees into the
state health insurance plan.
"The benefits provided under the state insurance plan are substandard
and equivalent to a significant cut in pay," according to Christianson.
"Educators have been active in determining their health insurance
benefits and have accepted lower wage increases to maintain the quality
of their insurance plan. To take away that ability is paternalistic,
unfair and mean-spirited."
Marinette teacher Thomas Baribeau told the roundtable that his school
district has experienced health insurance increases of 19%, 14% and
38% over the last three years.
"With the restrictions provided by the QEO, decisions were made
on ways to decrease insurance rates while also still trying to obtain
some gains in salary," he said. "Unfortunately, making changes
in insurance plans, as well as our consumer practices regarding health
care services, has not always provided the desired results. Last year,
teachers in our district saw pay cuts ranging from $363 to $760."
Patt said proponents of the budget plan claim it would save school
districts money.
"There is nothing in this proposal that will guarantee that such
cost savings will actually be realized, nor is there any guarantee that
these assumed savings will be applied to the salary schedule,"
he said. "The collective bargaining process does not guarantee
that teachers will have access to the money the district saved, but
we instead will need to bargain hard to get back those funds that are
rightly ours and have been taken away."
Cedar Lakes United Educators Director Sam Froiland told Riemer and
the audience that the proposal "seeks to inflict punishment on
employees who have made rational decisions to protect their benefit
levels in an environment that precluded employers from offering economic
settlements that would justify significant concessions in the area of
insurance."
Froiland added that if the public sector and unions are going to address
the spiraling costs of health care, "it will require a spirit of
shared interest and shared decision-making that can only occur when
the bargaining law shakes itself free of the politically motivated box
that it is currently in. Within a fair system of collective bargaining,
employers and their unions can have more of a shared interest in making
the increasingly difficult decisions related to health insurance coverage."
Posted June 19, 2003