Go on Strike, Lose Your Health Benefits

If you work for a company that provides health benefits isn't it only logical that if you stop working the company should stop your benefits?

Attorneys representing 500 striking employees at Coke filed a class action lawsuit against the Company yesterday for violations of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) after Coke canceled the employees' health care. Five plaintiffs were named in the complaint.

ERISA is the federal law that sets minimum standards for health plans in private industry to protect individuals covered under these plans.

"My wife had a kidney transplant two years ago. When Coke cancelled our health care, they cut off her anti-rejection medication. This shows me that Coke doesn't care about its employees," said Bill Mauhl, a 34-year Coke employee, who works in the company's production facility in Bellevue.

"In my almost twenty years of representing workers and unions in labor disputes, it's hard to think of any past instance where I have seen an employer retaliate against its striking workers in a manner as egregious as what the Coca-Cola Bottling Company has done here," said Dmitri Iglitzin, an attorney at Schwerin Campbell Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt, an employment law firm based in Seattle.

When you go on strike you stop getting paid by the company. Do these people think they should still be getting paid while they're not working? Why shouldn't the company stop their other benefits too?

Chances are the strikers receiving some sort of strike benefit from their union. Maybe they should ask the union that advised them to go on strike to pay for their health benefits.