News of the Week: Bernie Sanders to propose job guarantee for all Americans
Each week we share articles on subjects that are important to NUHW and its members. Here are several must-read stories over the past seven days:
Sen. Bernie Sanders will announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,” embracing the kind of large-scale government works project that Democrats have shied away from in recent decades. According to the Washington Post, Sanders’s jobs guarantee would fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals. Under the job guarantee, every American would be entitled to a job under one of these projects or receive job training to be able to do so, according to an early draft of the proposal.
The Trump administration says it plans to roll back a rule issued by President Barack Obama that prevents doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies from discriminating against transgender people, the New York Times reports. Advocates said the change could jeopardize the significant gains that transgender people have seen in access to medical care, including gender reassignment procedures — treatments for which many insurers denied coverage in the past.
California is taking the lead on opposing the Trump Administration’s drive to make health care less affordable to low income people, Kaiser Health News reports. In response to recent moves from the White House, California lawmakers are debating bills that would prohibit work requirements in Medi-Cal; ban the sale of short-term plans in the state; and increase the percentage of insurance premiums that must go toward consumers’ care.
For the first time in decades, union membership is on the rise among young people, according to Talk Poverty. In 2017, there were 262,000 new union members in the United States, 75 percent of whom were under age 35. Young people also hold the most favorable attitudes towards labor of any generation, and their support for political parties skews heavily towards those that support pro-worker policies (like standing against “right-to-work” laws), including the Democrats and, increasingly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).