I Am a Union Worker, and I Want Medicare for All

By Ashley Payne, Jacobin

27 December 19

My union is in a perpetual battle for decent health care coverage. It’s a tactic of our employers to prevent us from striking against our terrible work conditions. If we had Medicare for All, we could demand much more at the bargaining table.

n Contra Costa County, one of the nine Bay Area counties, I work in social services. As an elected union officer, I organize and represent our unit of eligibility workers and social workers. We are literally the ones who determine who is eligible to have access to what the United States has designed to be our social safety net. I have been in this job for more than five years.

Rappers make songs about us. If you want food stamps, cash aid, or Medicaid, you come to me and my fellow union members. If you’re a mandated reporter and you call the referral line to report suspected child abuse, we are the ones who pick up the phones and investigate, removing children from dangerous homes where need-be. We are the ones who determine whether an older person is eligible for in-home support services (IHSS) so that they can stay out of a nursing home. We are also disaster workers helping out fire-ridden neighbors, just to the north of us in Sonoma County.

Our jobs are sometimes dangerous because we visit people’s homes who may not always have the resources to maintain a safe home for themselves, their family, and other occupants. We are regularly subjected to emotional, verbal, and sometimes even physical abuse and danger. Usually, many things have already gone wrong in a person’s life before they land at our doorstep requiring government assistance. All this is to say our job is stressful, and the turnover in our unit is high.

What makes our jobs even more stressful is knowing that we’re only providing partial help. Many of the benefits we offer are means-tested instead of universally provided and adequately funded. Our clients need and deserve more help than what’s on offer from the feds and the state. This means we are frequently having to explain to people why they are no longer eligible to receive assistance. We have to delicately navigate hearings and appeals over benefits that were only partially meeting their needs in the first place, and have now been distorted and tampered with by whoever is in Congress or the State Assembly and State Senate those two years.

Compounding Stresses

If serving the public weren’t hard enough already, our employer makes our jobs even more difficult. We suffer from chronic understaffing which results in high caseloads, burnout, and high staff turnover. Our benefits package is expensive compared to surrounding Bay Area counties even though we are, according to my large public-sector union, the fourth-wealthiest county in the state, in the fifth-largest economy in the world.

As Contra Costa County employees, we pay a hefty amount toward our health, dental, and vision insurances, especially in comparison to our peer agencies. Health care is the top concern heard from our four-thousand-member labor coalition of nine unions.

Social services is highly gendered work so we have a lot of women carrying dependents on their plans. For those who are married, our spousal waiver rate is very high, meaning the county’s plan is being waived in favor of their spouse’s more affordable plan. The rates vary wildly, with no single plan being obviously more affordable. We are being robbed in Contra Costa County, as are so many workers across the United States.

As part of our contract extensions are now due to expire in June 2022, last fall, our union spent vast amounts of time bargaining health care. We know this is the number one reason that drives staff and potential new hires out of the county and into neighboring agencies like City and County of San Francisco, Alameda County, and Solano County, all of which offer far more affordable health care benefits.

The wage increases that we did win aren’t felt in our paychecks, because they have been eaten up by the January 1 increases to our health care plans. Year after year, our salaries continue to fall behind our peer agencies because of our exorbitant health care costs. In fact, we are still meeting over health care. Elected union officers and our union staff meet collectively every month with our employer to rework our health care system to move to a more sustainable solution.

Among ourselves, we union members know that we are wasting our time. We spend days and nights poring over spreadsheets, studying RFPs from health insurers, surveying our members about their chief health care concerns, and trying to divine why they chose one plan over another. Over time, this becomes an obstacle to bargaining for better working conditions to improve our public services. If we had Medicare for All, we could be marching on the boss about the numerous health and safety violations in our workplace.

It feels like (I don’t feel it, I know it is!) a union-busting move for employers to be opposed to Medicare for All: they know they can tie up our limited capacity and our members’ limited attention with health care. It monopolizes our organizing, so that we no longer have the means to strike back at the mean rich people in our county who don’t want their taxes raised.

Our union members are in these jobs to help people. We could have gone somewhere else to work, but we chose to work in social services so as to help provide for and protect some of the most vulnerable people in our communities — even if that means that some of our members make so little that their own kids qualify for the same Medicaid benefits we administer.

Our employer should want their employees to stay and perform their jobs well because it helps the community. Our employer is the government — not a private company stealing value from their employees to generate profits at all costs — so we should be on the same side. Unfortunately, we’re not.

Lemurs Are the World's Most Endangered Mammals, but Planting Trees Can Help Save Them

By Andrea L. Baden, The Conversation

27 December 19

he island of Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa hosts at least 12,000 plant species and 700 vertebrate species, 80% to 90% of which are found nowhere else on Earth. 

Isolated for the last 88 million years and covering an area approximately the size of the northeastern United States, Madagascar is one of the world's hottest biodiversity hotspots. Its island-wide species diversity is striking, but its tropical forest biodiversity is truly exceptional. 

Sadly, human activities are ravaging tropical forests worldwide. Habitat fragmentation, over-harvesting of wood and other forest products, over-hunting, invasive species, pollution and climate change are depleting many of these forests' native species. 

Among these threats, climate change receives special attention because of its global reach. But in my research, I have found that in Madagascar it is not the dominant reason for species decline, although of course it's an important long-term factor.

As a primatologist and lemur specialist, I study how human pressures affect Madagascar's highly diverse and endemic signature species. In two recent studies, colleagues and I have found that in particular, the ruffed lemur – an important seed disperser and indicator of rainforest health – is being disproportionately impacted by human activities. Importantly, habitat loss is driving ruffed lemurs' distributions and genetic health. These findings will be key to helping save them.

The Forest Is Disappearing 

Madagascar has lost nearly half (44%) of its forests within the last 60 years, largely due to slash-and-burn agriculture – known locally as "tavy" – and charcoal production. Habitat loss and fragmentation runs throughout Madagascar's history, and the rates of change are staggering.

This destruction threatens Madagascar's biodiversity and its human population. Nearly 50% of the country's remaining forest is now located within 300 feet (100 meters) of an unforested area. Deforestation, illegal hunting and collection for the pet trade are pushing many species toward the brink of extinction.

In fact, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that 95% of Madagascar's lemurs are now threatened, making them the world's most endangered mammals. Pressure on Madagascar's biodiversity has significantly increased over the last decade.

Deforestation Threatens Ruffed Lemur Survival 

In a newly published study, climate scientist Toni Lyn Morelli, species distribution expert Adam Smith and I worked with 19 other researchers to study how deforestation and climate change will affect two critically endangered ruffed lemur species over the next century. Using combinations of different deforestation and climate change scenarios, we estimate that suitable rainforest habitat could be reduced by as much as 93%.

If left unchecked, deforestation alone could effectively eliminate ruffed lemurs' entire eastern rainforest habitat and with it, the animals themselves. In sum, for these lemurs the effects of forest loss will outpace climate change.

But we also found that if current protected areas lose no more forest, climate change and deforestation outside of parks will reduce suitable habitat by only 62%. This means that maintaining and enhancing the integrity of protected areas will be essential for saving Madagascar's rainforest habitats.

In a study published in November 2019, my colleagues and I showed that ruffed lemurs depend on habitat cover to survive. We investigated natural and human-caused impediments that prevent the lemurs from spreading across their range, and tracked the movement of their genes as they ranged between habitats and reproduced. This movement, known as gene flow, is important for maintaining genetic variability within populations, allowing lemurs to adapt to their ever-changing environments.

Based on this analysis, we parsed out which landscape variables – including rivers, elevation, roads, habitat quality and human population density – best explained gene flow in ruffed lemurs. We found that human activity was the best predictor of ruffed lemurs' population structure and gene flow. Deforestation alongside human communities was the most significant barrier.

Taken together, these and other lines of evidence show that deforestation poses an imminent threat to conservation on Madagascar. Based on our projections, habitat loss is a more immediate threat to lemurs than climate change, at least in the immediate future.

This matters not only for lemurs, but also for other plants and animals in the areas where lemurs are found. The same is true at the global level: More than one-third (about 36.5%) of Earth's plant species are exceedingly rare and disproportionately affected by human use of land. Regions where the most rare species live are experiencing higher levels of human impact.

Crisis Can Drive Conservation 

Scientists have warned that the fate of Madagascar's rich natural heritage hangs in the balance. Results from our work suggest that strengthening protected areas and reforestation efforts will help to mitigate this devastation while environmentalists work toward long-term solutions for curbing the runaway greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.

Already, nonprofits are working hard toward these goals. A partnership between Dr. Edward E. Louis Jr., founder of Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership and director of Conservation Genetics at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, and the Arbor Day Foundation's Plant Madagascar project has replanted nearly 3 million trees throughout Kianjavato, one region identified by our study. Members of Centre ValBio's reforestation team – a nonprofit based just outside of Ranomafana National Park that facilitates our ruffed lemur research – are following suit.

At an international conference in Nairobi earlier this year, Madagascar's president, Andry Rajoelina, promised to reforest 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) every year for the next five years – the equivalent of 75,000 football fields. This commitment, while encouraging, unfortunately lacks a coherent implementation plan.

Our projections highlight areas of habitat persistence, as well as areas where ruffed lemurs could experience near-complete habitat loss or genetic isolation in the not-so-distant future. Lemurs are an effective indicator of total non-primate community richness in Madagascar, which is another way of saying that protecting lemurs will protect biodiversity. Our results can help pinpoint where to start.