Obama administration loosens requirements in health benefit legislation after pressure from McDonalds.

McDonald's workers on strike in Auckland NZ

Back in September, McDonald‘s Corporation, the world’s largest distributor of toys that employs more than one and a half million people worldwide, applied a little bit of economic terrorism in order to influence the US government’s health care legislation. McDonald's, like most low waged employers that provide some level of medical benefits for their employees, does so through what are referred to in the industry as “mini-med” plans.

The mini-meds offer coverage to some 1.4 million low waged American workers and McDonald’s threatened to drop the plan for 30,000 workers unless the US government exempt them from a requirement in the recent health care legislation that mandates a certain percentage of the premiums be spent on actual medical care. Most workers pay about $14 a week for this coverage that caps annual benefits at $2000. For $32 dollars a week, the cap jumps to $10,000.

The requirement, due to begin in 2011, would force large carriers like McDonalds to spend 85% of its premium on medical care, 80% for smaller carriers. The employers’ organizations are up in arms about this as it will mean, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, less money for “salaries, profit and other non-medical costs”; profit being the key word here I would say. If the employers don’t meet this requirement they will be forced to issue rebate checks to workers----this is the “big government” that they are opposed to, when the scales tip slightly in the favor of workers. Corporate tax benefits, trillions in bailouts and more on predatory wars that enrich the arms industry bosses are OK.

The low wage employers (that’ll be all employers if things continue in the direction they are heading) are a sneaky bunch of bastards. Their public arguments against the requirements are that they will not be able to meet them because of high administration costs on the one hand, which they claim are not “medical expenses”, and the fact that they have a high turnover and therefore pay out very little in claims. McDonalds says that 85% of the participants in its plans have less than $5000 in medial expenses a year. Admittedly, young people tend to have less medical problems than older people but $5000 is not much medical expense in the USA. It’s more likely that people would make more use of medical care on offer were it affordable and the dark cloud of the employer’s ax was not hanging over their heads. And don’t young people have children?

One other benefit of a high turnover of employees that receive benefits at $14 or $32 a week who don't use them is that money goes somewhere doesn't it?

Well, the economic terrorists got their way. Under pressure from the employers, the Obama administration caved and has reduced the percentage of their premiums that the super exploiters of youth and sellers of garbage food will be forced to pay will drop to 50% from 85%. McDonalds is “pleased and encouraged” says the Wall Street Journal, by what it consider “progress” on the issue. In other words, it’s not the end yet; just “progress”. McDonalds says it is “committed” to provide competitive pay and benefits to those 30,000 workers.

We have to consider what thugs these characters are. They provide rotten food to our children. They especially exploit the poor and vulnerable with their cheap fare. They use toys and circus figures to push children to torment their parents to take them to their restaurants. They use their massive economic power to bribe politicians (they prefer to call this lobbying) and influenced agricultural policy.

As Eric Schlosser pointed out in his excellent book, Fast Food Nation,

The McDonald's Corp. has become a powerful symbol of America's service economy, the sector now responsible for ninety percent of the country's new jobs. In 1968, McDonald's operated about 1,000 restaurants. Today it has about 23,000 restaurants worldwide and opens roughly 2,000 new ones each year. An estimated one of every eight Americans has worked at McDonald's. The company annually trains more new workers than the U.S. Army. McDonald's is the nation's largest purchaser of beef and potatoes. It is the second-largest purchaser of poultry. A whole new breed of chicken was developed to facilitate the production of McNuggets. The McDonald's Corp. is the largest owner of retail property in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent. McDonald's spends more money on advertising and marketing than does any other brand, much of it targeted at children. A survey of American schoolchildren found that ninety-six percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonald's on the nation's culture, economy and diet is hard to overstate. Its corporate symbol - the Golden Arches - is now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.

 McDonald’s, like the others of its kind, including the stupid man with the thing over his head we see on TV, provide measly health benefits to their workers and are fiercely anti-Union yet the garbage they sell is thought by many nutritionists to be linked to serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease, obesity and diabetes. These diseases are now responsible for nearly three-quarters of premature deaths in the western world. What does this cost the taxpayer?

The other negative aspect of the fast food industry is the effect it has on agricultural production in South America for example where grain is fed to cattle for McDonald's hamburgers. I read the following from an online source and unfortunately cannot re-locate the source but I think it is widely known, “Cattle consume 10 times the amount of grain and soy that humans do: one calorie of beef demands ten calories of grain. Of the 145 million tons of grain and so fed to livestock, only 21 million tons of meat and by-products are used. The waste is 124 million tons per year at a value of 20 billion US dollars. It has been calculated that this sum would feed, clothe and house the world's entire population for one year.”

I was talking with a friend today and he was telling me about some Obama supporters, I think it was Moveon.org, talking about wanting to get “our” president back. We both agreed, the problem is Obama never was “our” president and his administration was never “our” administration; the Democratic Party, the former party of the slave owners, was never and never will be, “our” party. Obama has always been a rather slick, glossy representative of US capitalism.

Another friend I was talking with started off by telling me how she is not political. But it became clear she is political, but the two parties of the employers dominate political life in the US. “I don’t see the point in voting”, she told me, “None of them represent me, they’re all rotten” This thinking is rampant. And look at what McDonald’s just did. They took the lead representing the fast food industry, as well as the likes of Home Depot, Disney Worldwide Services, CVS, Staples, Blockbuster and others, and blackmailed the government in to changing clauses in legislation that cut in to their profits.

These employers are economic terrorists and polluters of the natural world and our stomachs; they are a health risk in all manner of ways, especially when you work for them.. We cannot expect the two capitalist parties to defend us from their assault. The struggle to organize the workers in these industries and build an independent political party of the working class that can begin to loosen the grip they have on food production and agricultural practices go hand in hand.