LABOR BRIEFING

HEALTH CARE: Organized labor has targeted improvements in health care as a top national legislative priority in 1991.

“Clearly, the current U.S. health care system is not getting the job done and we intend to do something about it,” said AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland. “Our campaign will include national television advertising, mass mailings and every other avenue we can use to help focus public attention on the health care crisis and to get action from Congress and the Administration.”

Kirkland acknowledged that the trade union movement “has not come forward with a specific proposal for solving this problem.” AFL-CIO officials have conducted hearings in Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and other cities in an effort to develop policy suggestions.

At one hearing in Louisville, Ky., delegates were told that even though the United States leads the world in total health care spending, as many as one in three Americans either has inadequate medical insurance or none at all.

REPLACEMENT ISSUE: The future status of “replacement” workers is one of the major issues blocking settlement of the violence-marred strike at the New York Daily News. But some labor leaders in Washington, arguing that strikers always should be guaranteed that they can return to their jobs, cite last month’s settlement of a Las Vegas casino strike as a case in point.

After striking for nearly 10 months, members of two hotel and restaurant employees locals signed a contract with a major casino allowing all strikers to return to work with increased wages and benefits, displacing those who had taken their jobs during the dispute.

Under the agreement between Culinary Workers Local 226 and Bartenders Local 165 and Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, all strikers were offered their former jobs, stations and shifts. Casino owners agreed to rehire the workers as part of a settlement of a National Labor Relations Board complaint alleging that they had engaged in unfair labor practices.

The secretary-treasurer of Local 226 said that 500 workers have gone back to their old jobs, while 74 other union members have chosen to keep new jobs found since the strike began last January.

John Wilhelm, an international vice president of the hotel workers union, recently told employees: “When the story of the American labor movement’s recovery from the dark days of the 1980s is written, the first chapter will be the heroic victory of the United Mine Workers against the Pittston Coal Co. The second chapter will be about you.”

CORRUPTION: When it comes to investigating labor corruption, the FBI is the law enforcement agency that gets most of the glory. But a lesser-known unit within the Labor Department, the Office of Labor Racketeering, continues to toil in the vineyard without much credit.

The unit has only 103 field agents but regards itself as “the little engine that could.” Its chief, Gustave Schick, a former FBI agent, said that his employees have more labor experience than FBI agents because they work only labor corruption cases.

“Our No. 1 priority currently is rooting out fraud in employee benefit plans, schemes that are costing working men and women many thousands of dollars in lost benefits and contributions,” Schick said.

In the last year, the unit’s investigations have resulted in indictments of 139 individuals and convictions of 79.