No Benefits

Forget the public option — gimme a SEPTA plan.

by Isaiah Thompson

Let's talk benefits — and not the friends-with kind. Wachovia has long offered its employees here a good benefit indeed — up to about 40 percent of the cost of tuition at FunKids Knowledge Learning Center, a day care inside the Wachovia building at Fourth and Market. It's great, parents tell me: great location, great teachers, great curriculum — the kind of benefit that just two years ago earned Wachovia the distinction of being a Working Mother magazine top-10 employer. Enter Wells Fargo Co., which took over Wachovia in December 2008 and promptly began cutting benefits — like day care. Parents now face a choice: Pay full tuition, or take their kids elsewhere by Jan. 1. For Wachovia employee Bissett Durham and husband Bill — whose (fortuitously named) son, Isaiah, 4, just started pre-K — it's a real problem. They'd have to pay about $1,000 more a month. "It's not even feasible for us," Bill Durham says.

FunKids will now be open to neighborhood residents. There'll still be kids there come January, but, considering the neighborhood, they'll probably be richer and whiter. Wachovia spokeswoman Barbara Nate says the cuts were about "employee equity" — see, only some bank employees around the country have that benefit, and the bank can't be expected to extend this benefit elsewhere, not in these times. Sure, times are tough. But not, necessarily, for Wells Fargo Co., which accepted some $25 billion in federal bailout money. The bank hasn't paid the money back yet, but it did manage to give raises — technically, increased stock options — to its top four executives this year. CEO John Stumpf now gets a $5.6 million salary. Talk about benefits!

Speeeeaking of benefits ... how about that SEPTA strike? Among the demands that Transport Workers Union Local 234 said they just couldn't abide was a hike in their health-insurance contributions — currently 1 percent of their paychecks. One. Whole. Percent. Forget the public option, gimme a SEPTA plan. Why is it, I wonder, that one union can be out there clamoring to keep their amazingly generous health care terms while another, like the scrappy Taxi Workers Alliance, barely has a pot to piss in? Drivers are lobbying for HB 1914, which would let them get workers' comp. Currently, they're eligible for precisely squat, despite a government report that found cabbies are 60 times more likely to be murdered on the job than other workers.

The TWA, I should mention, supports the TWU — and hey, nothing wrong with union solidarity. But there's benefits, and then there's benefits.