Labor Groups to Press Obama on Health Care and a Second Stimulus Effort

[Joanne98]

When President Obama meets with a dozen union presidents next Monday, the plan is to focus on their shared goals, not their differences.

One key item, administration officials and union leaders say, will be health-care reform and how to assure Congress enacts universal coverage.

But several labor leaders said that with unemployment nearing 15 million, they plan to urge the president to push for a second stimulus package — something that has stirred quite a bit of controversy lately. Administration officials, including most recently Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr, and Democratic lawmakers haven’t closed the door to that possibility but have counseled patience in monitoring the effects of the current $787 billion stimulus.

“There are a lot of issues of common interest to the administration and to the folks who will be in the room,” said Nate Tamarin, an associate White House political director. “The fact is that this is a group of leaders who individually and as a group are important to us.”

The meeting will include John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Anna Burger, president of the rival Change to Win labor federation, and Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, which is not in either federation.

Union leaders say they will tell the president that their organizations will do what they can to win passage of universal health coverage, preferably with the public option that many Republicans oppose.

“It does not take a lot of ask for the labor movement to be supportive of health-care reform and to be supportive of the public option,” said Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director. “There are a lot of shared interests between them and the president’s goals on health-care reform.”

He added, “It’s more of a conversation about how to get there.”

At the meeting, Mr. Obama will underline his concerns about the troubled economy and discuss what the administration is doing to fix it, White House officials said.

“You can expect that the president is really going to try to focus some portion of the conversation on the economy and job growth,” Mr. Gaspard said. “We all know where we’re headed with unemployment. Obviously the folks around the table have an acute interest in the economy, and the president wants to hear from them about what basically needs to happen to grow the economy and to stabilize the middle class right now.”

Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said the labor leaders would of course want to discuss the card check bill legislation that would make it easier to unionize workers. That legislation is stalled, with opposition preventing Democratic senators from acquiring the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Mr. McEntee said the focus of the meeting would be on health-care legislation. For decades, universal health coverage has been a goal of the nation’s labor movement.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/labor-groups-to-press-obama-on-health-care-and-a-second-stimulus-effort/