But if you pay a little closer attention, you probably know better.

But just in case you don’t think reform is needed, maybe you should consider that the per capita cost of health care in the U.S. is about double what it is in other industrialized countries. Or perhaps you should know that 7 out of 10 people who declare bankruptcy due to medical bills already have health insurance. Or maybe (if you need more motivation to support health care reform) I should tell you that the U.S. also lags behind other industrialized nations in terms of life expectancy.

All of these factors affect us, whether we realize it or not. And the rapidly rising cost of health insurance premiums will even affect those of us with good union-negotiated health care benefits — if we don’t do something to stem the tide.

Health care benefits are a huge part of every contract negotiated with companies like UPS, and the more expensive those benefits get, the more desperately management will try to do away with them. The rising cost of health coverage in the U.S. is also a huge part the competitive disadvantage hurting many U.S. companies whose overseas competitors benefit from more cohesive, government-structured health care.

All these facts aside, there are still people buying the propaganda that our health care (health insurance) system is the best in the world. And it probably should be, considering our system is twice as expensive. But the sad fact is most of the extra costs we face end up padding the profit margins of the insurance industry, not improving the quality of our health care.

Something needs to be done to curb the out-of-control health care costs in this country, but too many people are still stuck in the mud of lies from the past:

• Lies that suggest health care reform includes “death panels” to decide who lives and who dies — even though no such plan exists. The provision being distorted in this lie is one that provides optional counseling for those wishing to make advanced directives.
• Lies that suggest a government run program would be second-rate and include “rationing” — even though the best-ranked health care systems in the U.S. are the Veterans Administration and Medicare (which are run by the government) and neither engages in rationing anywhere near as much as the health insurance companies that deny life-saving coverage because of technicalities like “pre-existing conditions.”
• Lies that suggest we don’t need reform because there aren’t really 45 million uninsured in this country — even though the problems with our system affect the insured almost as badly as the uninsured.

The White House has put up a site to debunk some of the myths and misunderstandings, which you can access by clicking the image at the top of this post, or by clicking here.

It’s important to educate ourselves on this vital issue, and then to make our voices heard. I encourage you to do both, before it’s too late.

In watching President Obama’s announcement yesterday concerning the U.S. auto industry, I was disappointed to hear him suggest that UAW employees may be in line for even more forced concessions if the industry is to be saved. I hope that isn’t so. Especially not after hearing members of the administration defend the validity of AIG bonuses under the guise of honoring contracts.

If a contract is a contract, then it should be that way whether you’re an overpaid executive or an assembly line worker struggling to keep his family afloat. I hope President Obama understands that as well.

Watch the President’s address:

Click here to find out who your representatives are. Then email or call them to let them know you will hold them accountable if they fail to stand up for real Americans — because however anyone feels about the idea of bailouts, the failure to take action will have a directly catastrophic effect on regular Americans.

• Joe the Autoworker.com
• stories labeled ‘UAW’ at Joe’s Union Review
• ‘Debunking the myth of the $70-per-hour autoworker’ at The New Republic
• ‘Hands Off the UAW’ at The Nation

Even if you understand that $70 refers to more than just hourly wages, you might still have a completely false idea stuck in your head. The number being put out by those spreading the $70/hour lie refers to a strange formula based on total compensation figures.

The formula in question fails for one huge reason: the per hour cost for current union autoworkers is arrived at by adding benefit costs for retired union autoworkers as well. Using the same distorted math, someone could probably tell the same lie about UPS Teamsters. After all, our complete benefits package over the years is comparable in every way to what UAW members have been getting, and if you add in all UPS compensation/benefit costs (including hundreds of thousands of retirees) and only divide by the number of active employees, you’ll get a similarly huge distortion. So, if UAW members at GM, Ford and Chrysler are getting $70 an hour in total compensation, we probably aren’t far behind. But any Teamster working at UPS knows we don’t cost the company anywhere near that much.

If you’ve read this far, you should understand how utterly untrue the $70 per hour myth is. And if you understand that much, you might be wondering who would be starting such a misleading rumor.

Simply put, the rumor was started by people who exist to tear down unions and the gains unions have made on behalf of workers. And the path they’ve envisioned to tearing down unions goes right through Detroit, where they believe the failure (or restructuring) of the major American automakers will result in the collapse of the United Auto Workers union.

The rationale they like to offer is that, if the auto industry can vaporize the union, they can lower total compensation costs to more closely resemble those of foreign automakers employing workers in the U.S. (whose costs they estimate in the range of 40-50 dollars per hour). The problem with this rationale is that UAW members at the U.S.-owned auto plants are already closer to that compensation level than union bashers spreading these lies would have us believe. In fact, the most recent UAW contract with GM has drastically reduced GM’s liability for both retirees and active workers (a fact that has many in the UAW more than a little bothered), something the people behind the $70 per hour lie also fail to account for.

But the real danger is in allowing the anti-union dream scenario to become reality. If the union presence disappears or even decreases noticeably, all autoworkers, union or not, will see their compensation drop by a lot.

Remember when I mentioned that the anti-unionists want to erase “the gains unions have made on behalf of workers”? I didn’t say “union workers,” because I wasn’t just referring to union workers. I was referring to workers in any industry with a union presence.

Like the people at Fedex, who get just that much more in pay because UPS is unionized. Then there are the folks working for Toyota, Honda or the other foreign automakers with non-union plants in this country. You see, in both cases, non-union employers offer as much as they do because the unionized companies set a benchmark for industry compensation. Failing to offer compensation that appears close to the benchmark would make non-union plants easier targets for union organizing. And if the unions disappear, so does the benchmark — allowing non-union compensation to drift as low as management desires.

When unions are driven out of industries, those industries inevitably go minimum wage (think of meat processors, cutters and others in the meatpacking industry). And more minimum wage jobs are not what this economy needs.

But it’s probably just what the people telling the $70 an hour lie want.

Pay attention, because while it may be U.S. autoworkers under attack today, it will be others tomorrow. Someday, it will be UPS Teamsters getting smeared by some extravagant lie about how much more money they make compared to the average non-union worker. Don’t believe it? If you remember all the news reports from August, 1997, you know it’s already happened.

While Teamsters walked picket lines at UPS, there were voices on the news telling the American public that UPS workers make too much, have benefits that are too good, and so on. As UPS Teamsters know, we don’t receive exorbitant salaries or benefit packages, but that was the lie the anti-unionists were pushing.

Thankfully, the lie failed then. It failed because the union and others who were sympathetic to the workers’ cause beat it back. It will only fail again if the UAW and all the sympathetic voices they can find stand up and let people know it’s just another lie.

We need to join that sympathetic chorus and keep this lie from gathering steam. We can let our friends, family and government representatives know it’s a lie. We can make calls, send emails and letters to Congress. Tell them not to put automakers in a position to steal back hard-won rights from UAW members, or to eliminate the benchmark they’ve won for non-union autoworkers.

Again, it’s about solidarity. And again, it’s going to take an effort from everyone who understands what’s really at stake. You can start sending a message to your governmental representatives by clicking here.

Related links:

• Joe the Autoworker.com
• stories labeled ‘UAW’ at Joe’s Union Review
• ‘Debunking the myth of the $70-per-hour autoworker’ at The New Republic
• ‘Hands Off the UAW’ at The Nation

Barack Obama has the positions and policies that can actually help everyday people, while John McCain is pledging to extend the policies of the past eight years that have left regular people further and further behind. It doesn’t matter whether the issue is:

• taxes — where John McCain plans to give most of his tax cuts to the wealthiest, while Barack Obama plans to focus his tax relief on the majority of Americans who actually have to work for a living
• healthcare — where John McCain wants to eliminate coverage standards and employer based plans, while Barack Obama wants to take advantage of what already works and add to the mix of solutions
• other issues that directly affect working people like the Employee Free Choice Act — which McCain opposes, while Barack Obama has pledged to sign it into law

Barack Obama has put forth ideas that can better help working people and the middle class. A lifelong Republican like Steve Gallagher knows it. And so should every other regular American who understands today’s economic reality.

But in case not, here’s a short video to illustrate the point:

Visit TeamstersforObama.com. Go to the “Teamsters Speak” page to read more testimonials from actual Teamsters (including me), or you can add your own.

If you don’t already know the password for the Teamsters for Obama website, you can find it on the mailers bearing the website’s name, in recent issues of Teamster magazine, or follow the instructions on the login page to get the password.