March 21, 2008

In Election Year, Unions Stump for Health Care

By Andrew Salomon

Three years ago Meredith Kaunitz was getting ready for the next phase of her acting and dancing career. She had worked steadily in regional theatre up and down the East Coast, but nonunion pay wasn't enough to live on. So she updated her headshots, learned new monologues, and began attending Equity principal auditions in New York, hoping to compete for roles after the union actors had had their turn.

However, Kaunitz's next phase ended soon after it began, when she damaged her left hamstring during a dance audition. To this day, she does not know the extent of the injury because she has never had it examined by a doctor.

Kaunitz was among the millions of Americans without health insurance, a number the U.S. Census Bureau says was nearly 47 million in 2005, the last year for which numbers are available. "I was literally living hand to mouth at the time," Kaunitz said. "There was no way for me to get to a doctor to be seen." As a result of the injury, she has set aside her performance career and taken a full-time job as a receptionist, largely because it offers a health plan. "It's discouraging," she said, "especially every time I get an audition notice forwarded to me."

For many performing artists, Kaunitz's experience is the nightmare scenario: being forced to give up your artistic pursuits because of an injury. But organized labor -- including the three principal unions for actors -- has been advocating universal health care for almost two decades and is now stepping up its efforts in this presidential election year.

Pointing the Way

The AFL-CIO is circulating a petition that calls for comprehensive healthcare reform; the organization's goal is to get 1 million union members to sign. Throughout April, about 350 of the AFL-CIO's central labor councils will host group discussions on health care and the 2008 presidential campaign. These talks, about 15 to 20 a day, will be held across the country.

"What I want to do is to get 10 million union members, our families, our friends, and our neighbors to define the conversation in such a way that we tell the candidates why we're voting," said Nick Unger, training coordinator for the AFL-CIO's healthcare campaign. "For actors it's a piece of cake, because the current rules are skewed so far against you."

Actors' Equity Association is involved with its own informational campaign. With help from an outside consultant, the union has created a PowerPoint presentation that it is using to educate Equity Council members about health care. The presentation was shown to councilors in Los Angeles earlier this month and will be shown in Chicago April 7. Rank-and-file members will be able to see the presentation sometime during the coming months.

Members "can disagree, certainly, on our proposal, but they can at least understand what the language is," said Arne Gundersen, Equity's Eastern regional vice president and chair of the union's national committee on health care. "Everybody talks about [health care], but the minute you start showing people graphs with figures, their eyes start to glass over."

A Vulnerable Group

Like the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Equity advocates a single-payer (or universal) system that would be administered or overseen by the federal government. Equity has followed AFL-CIO strategy by campaigning for reform at the state level, but representatives of each of the three unions said comprehensive change eventually has to happen nationwide.

Tom Carpenter, general counsel and director of legislative affairs for AFTRA, said a state-by-state or piecemeal approach would not be effective for the union's members, many of whom travel from state to state to work. "A partial fix," he said, "is as good as no fix in some cases."

Pamm Fair, SAG's deputy national executive director for policy and strategic planning, said the guild was hopeful that California would pass a healthcare reform bill in its previous legislative session, but "the climate wasn't right for something meaningful."

Actors and other performers are particularly vulnerable when it comes to health care. Many must take jobs with flexible hours, and those jobs often don't come with health insurance. Even a union card does not guarantee coverage year to year. An Equity member must have worked at least 20 weeks in the previous 12 months to qualify for a year of coverage, or 12 weeks in the previous 12 months for six months' coverage. SAG members must have worked at least 74 days or earned at least $13,790 doing union-covered work in a year to qualify for the guild's most basic insurance. AFTRA members have to earn at least $10,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters to qualify for coverage.

Caroline Bielskis, a Los Angeles-based actor, has been a SAG member for three and a half years. Despite landing guest spots on shows such as Days of Our Lives and Gilmore Girls, she has never earned enough in one year to qualify for the guild's basic coverage. She dropped her private insurance when it became too costly. "I'm paying out all this money," she said, "but I'm getting hardly anything for it."

Said Unger, "The actors are in a funny position. A huge percentage of the membership does not work enough to have the number of hours to be covered." To the general public "they appear to be the elite, but they in fact are the underserved, the disenfranchised."

Andrew Salomon can be reached at asalomon@backstage.com