Top Union Boss: Law That Was Enacted Thanks Primarily to Big Labor’s Forced-Dues Political Machine ‘Threatens the Middle Class’

As a Sunday commentary for the Washington Examiner by veteran D.C. journalist Paul Bedard illustrates (see the link below), more and more high-ranking union officials are seeking nowadays to distance themselves from the four-year-old Affordable Care Act (ACA), the signature legislative achievement of the Obama Administration.

Bedard cites a new report on the ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare,  issued by top bosses of Unite Here, a hospitality industry union that wields monopoly-bargaining control over roughly 300,000 workers:

Unite Here warned that due to Obamacare’s much higher costs for health insurance than what union workers currently pay, the result will be a pay cut of up to $5 an hour. “If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage,” said the union in a new report.

“Only in Washington could asking the bottom of the middle class to finance health care for the poorest families be seen as reducing inequality,” said the report from Unite Here. “Without smart fixes, the ACA threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage,” said the report, titled, “The Irony of Obamacare: Making Inequality Worse.”

It’s not totally surprising that union officials like Unite Here czar Donald “D.” Taylor have since President Obama’s reelection in November 2012 become public critics of Obamacare.  In part for reasons laid out in the new Unite Here report, Obamacare is raising costs and slashing coverage for vast numbers of unionized employees along with millions of other Americans.

But Taylor and other born-again critics of Obamacare shouldn’t be allowed to get away with bashing this law without also acknowledging the undeniable fact that it would not even be on the books today were it not for Big Labor and its vast, forced dues-funded political war chest.

Indeed, it was top union bosses like Taylor who collectively spent a billion dollars or more, mostly money from forced dues-laden union treasuries, to make Barack Obama President and elect a Congress that would rubber-stamp his agenda in 2008.

And it was Big Labor that spent additional vast sums of forced-dues money on lobbying efforts to ensure Obamacare would be enacted in 2010 despite intense public opposition.

And it was the union hierarchy that again dug deep into its forced-dues treasuries to prevent Obamacare’s repeal by getting the Obama-Biden ticket reelected in 2012.

If rank-and-file unionists are as mad about Obamacare as Taylor and other union kingpins today say they are, they deserve to know that the key parties directly responsible for the fiasco are people like Donald “D.” Taylor.

Moreover, the most effective way to prevent future Obamacares is to pass a federal Right to Work law stripping Taylor and other Big Labor bosses of their privilege to force workers to pay union dues or fees, or be fired from their jobs.  In fact, the new Unite Here report on the impact of Obamacare (see the second link below) is a compelling, albeit inadvertent, advertisement for pending federal forced-dues repeal legislation (H.R.946/S.204).

Union: Obamacare will slash wages by up to $5 an hour 

Union Report Says Obamacare Will Hasten Income Inequality