Unions Refuse To Advocate for Obamacare Enrollment

Although the Obama administration has made
enrollment cheerleaders out of the
Baltimore Ravens,
Organizing for America, and the now-disgraced
Chad Henderson, many major unions who were allies of the
president are now treating Obamacare-advocacy like a hot
potato.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AFL-CIO), which has over 11 million members and is
the largest federation of unions in the country, is displeased
about the
false promises of Obamacare and refuses to promote enrollment
on the government’s behalf. It’s not just private sector unions,
though. Politico
explains:

The AFL-CIO isn’t lifting a finger to help the White House — it
remains in negotiations at the White House and on Capitol Hill to
change elements of the law it finds objectionable to workers. Those
talks were put on hold earlier this month during the government
shutdown — a far larger concern for the federal government employee
unions — and have begun to restart only in recent days, according
to officials from multiple unions.

Major public-sector unions also aren’t fired up to help the
White House with a law that won’t affect the vast majority of their
members. Nor are they ready to register people who aren’t union
workers for a benefit they won’t receive themselves.

Beth Moten, legislative and political director of the American
Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents over
650,000 federal employees,
said that although the AFGE would like to help, but “frankly,
we have our hands full in everything else, and we don’t have [the]
luxury of getting involved.”

Even the American Federation of Teachers, the largest teacher
union in the U.S., though they have made presentations for their
own members, refuse to get involved in the touting enrollment to
the communities in which they work. Furthermore, they expressed
concerns about how the healthcare system will impact part-time
teachers whose hours have been cut.

The imbroglio began earlier this year when the union leaders
realized that Obamacare was
not actually beneficial to their members and pensioners. The
Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union,
and UNITE HERE, which collectively have over 2.5 million members,

sent a strongly-worded letter to the president demanding that
changes be made so Obamacare would not hurt union workers. The
president did not come through. Unions recently made another effort
through the Senate Democrats, but that
failed, too. The
persistent problems that have been exposed since the Oct. 1
opening of the exchanges has done nothing to help the
situation.

Unions are not the only one-time supporters who have now turned
on Obamacare. Reason’s Nick Gillespie covered another
prominent advocate who recently abandoned ship.